The Girl With No Name: The Incredible True Story of a Child Raised by Monkeys (24 page)

The minute he turned his back, I’d scoop up the other items and, before he could stop me, be out the door and have melted back into the crowd.

If I got a buzz from stealing, I got an even bigger one when I joined a street gang. Within a few months, I’d got to know lots of other street kids, and when I was asked to join their gang, it felt like I’d passed some sort of test. Me included, there were six of us – three boys and three girls – and we were quite a mix, not least in our odd assortment of names.

There was Sincabow, the black boy, then Daggo. Daggo was probably the oldest – he behaved that way anyway – and also the angriest. He’d run away from a vicious and violent father who would beat him and his siblings daily, while his mother just looked on and did nothing. Then there was Hugo – the one who wanted to be a bank robber. The girls were me – Pony Malta – then Mimi, probably the youngest (she was even tinier than I was), and finally Bayena, which means ‘whale’. Poor Bayena. She got her name for pretty obvious reasons – she was the biggest-bellied girl on the streets.

Bayena was very weak, and she didn’t like stealing. She was one of those new ones who’d not long been kicked out of home – too many mouths to feed – and knew nothing whatsoever about surviving. Hardened myself now, I sometimes got annoyed about how fussy and wimpy she was, but despite our differences we were a good team.

The clever thing about our gang was that we each had our strengths – our own trademark talents for stealing. But I could teach them all things, I realised, because I’d been learning my craft thoroughly. I had all the tricks of the trade up my sleeves. I knew, for instance, who the best targets were on the streets, and one of my favourites was to target women who wore skirts and carried brown paper bags.

A woman in a miniskirt was the best sight to see, ever. As long as they were also clutching a pair of brown paper bags, it meant the chance of some easy pickings. I’d stalk my target for a while, just to be sure of a decent exit, and then creep ever closer, till I was in range. I’d keep low, which wasn’t difficult, and also silent, and then I’d pounce, yanking their pants down to expose their bare bottoms, enjoying the sound of their mortified shrieks as they dropped the bags and struggled to pull their knickers up again.

I was always amused to see how hard they seemed to find this simple task, which taught me another lesson: embarrassment makes you all fingers and thumbs! It worked every time. There’d be ample opportunity to gather up everything I could fit in two hands before I scooted off to enjoy my spoils. In fact, one of my best memories of being a street kid was my very first Christmas. Ladies in skirts, carrying paper bags containing their Christmas shopping, were, for me, almost like Father Christmas.

I was constantly adding to our repertoire of schemes. During the football season, I always did particularly well. I would steal people’s tickets while they queued to get in and then sell them on for double the price at the gate. I would also steal road cones and make my own impromptu car park – always on someone else’s land, obviously. Sometimes I’d even charge for a single free parking space, and people – particularly if they were late and just desperate to get a parking space before the game started – would cough up without even protesting. Over time I built up my own stash of cones that I hid away in a secret place so I could maximise my profits.

I also made money, for a time, as a shoe polisher. That didn’t last long, however, as a couple of months after I’d stolen my shoe-polishing box, someone else stole it. How rude.

Despite the odd setback, I grew more and more successful, and I became one of the best burglars and money-makers on the streets of Cúcuta. Eventually, my success – and my bravery – meant I was widely respected, and I was asked by the others to become leader of our gang. Even now, I remember how proud I felt to be admired by my peers.

And also how much fun we had. I remember that, too. We were still children, after all, and when we weren’t busy scavenging or stealing we’d play hide-and-seek, chase, sometimes ball games (if we’d found one) and ‘chicken’, a game children from all parts of the world know. In our case, it involved running in front of cars on the teeming city streets. It’s amazing I never saw anyone get hit.

*

I lived on the streets of Cúcuta for around two or three years. I struggle to remember the time in terms of years, first because I didn’t really know my age to start with and second because when you lived in the way we did, the concept of time – work days and rest days, term times and holidays – had no meaning at all for me. It never had done, as there were no ‘weeks’ or ‘months’ in the jungle.

It’s only now, having watched my own daughters growing up, that I can recognise, through noticing their stages of development, how old I might have been at each stage in my own life. I now believe I must have been around twelve or thirteen when something happened to me that would make me want to turn my back on the life I was living.

As lives went, looking back on it, it was really pretty bleak. Almost every night, our sleep would be interrupted. People would urinate on us, throw rocks at us and kick us for no reason. Drunken men would stroke the girls’ legs, while laughing dirtily. The only safe places to sleep would naturally also be the filthiest places, where the air smelt of sewage. We couldn’t ask for a glass of water if we were thirsty, because everyone despised us – and no wonder, for we stole from them daily, to survive. Passers-by would taunt us by holding out a hand to us, a hand that might hold a burger, and then, when we tentatively reached out to take it, they’d snatch it away again, laughing. People looked at us in disgust, because to them we were disgusting.

Although there were highlights to my day – like my meals from posh restaurants – life on the streets, despite the odd thrill and success, was difficult, scary and uncomfortable. We never really knew where our next meal was coming from, or if today would be the day when we would get caught by the law. Our gang grew, but it also, from time to time, shrank again, as children would get arrested, never to return to us. Daggo, in particular, I remember disappearing one day. He used to attack drunk men and steal their wallets – that was his speciality. He was my friend, but he had a dark, violent edge. I wonder where he is now. I wonder if he’s still alive. I wonder where they all are, what became of them.

We were always on our toes, keeping alert at all times in case we fell victim to a mugging, a rape or an arrest. And although we were all in the same boat and had an intense, loyal friendship, none of us could care for one another in the way that a parent could. Inside I was still searching for a mother’s love. It was what I thought about often as I tried to go to sleep.

At night, it was hard to find a safe and comfortable place to sleep. Older and wiser, I didn’t risk the trees in the park any more. The best place I knew was the secret children’s place. If you ever visit Cúcuta, or maybe other similar cities of the world, you will see secret places under bridges that kids can wriggle into. I don’t know what they’re called, but they hang beneath the main structure. Perhaps they are some integral part of the engineering, to support the metalwork and roadway above them. In any event, they felt hard to reach and so secure. So that’s where the street kids like to sleep.

Back then they were the safest place, because the police didn’t really know of them, and even if they did – and I’m sure this is true the world over – the gaps were child-sized, and no policeman could fit through. It was, however, horribly smelly. Inside would be a small contained area, with no through draught, and the kids would urinate, drink alcohol, eat and take drugs there. The odour of unwashed bodies – mine included – seemed to permeate everything. It was an acrid stench that seemed to singe your nostrils; it was a stench you could never get used to.

Yet you adapted to being filthy and living in gutters. On some nights when I was too tired to get to a bridge support, I’d simply curl up in whatever smelly drain I could find. Unsanitary living was my norm. I would rummage around in dustbins, drink water from drain pipes, and washing myself didn’t even cross my mind any more. I would only do the minimum required to carry out my little scams, and my minimum standards were dropping by the day.

And there was another dark side: what street life did to your psyche. There were so many damaged, abandoned children. So much pain and so much anger. When people don’t respect you, it makes you want to lash out, and bit by bit you then lose all respect for yourself as well. Eventually, you start to wonder why you were ever born. Gradually, I was turning into a different sort of person, my mind focused more and more on my criminal plots and schemes, and the bad part of me, the part that exists in every human being, was taking over from the good.

The reason for this was probably anger. Of all the emotions I have described during my time on the streets, anger was by far the strongest one. And it wasn’t just me – it was felt by every child in that situation. Of course it was – we had so much to be angry about. No child asks to be born to a life of such hardship. No child deserves to be treated as scum by complete strangers – strangers who probably had the luxury of being brought up by people who loved and cared for them. We could turn to no one. Of course we were angry.

But then one day I bumped into a street kid I knew. Except she wasn’t a street kid any more. She wore nice clothes and looked clean, and she’d lost that hunted, tense look. So much so that it was she who recognised me. I wouldn’t have even known it was the same girl.

‘Pony Malta!’ she called to me. It was towards the middle of the day. The sun was high and I was sweating and on my way to a restaurant, hoping to steal something filling for lunch. She was out on an errand, shopping. She carried a bag, though not a paper one. She must have been fourteen or so, not much older than I was. But in every other sense, light years away.

‘Millie?’ I said, shocked. ‘Where have you been? Where have you gone?’

‘I have a job,’ she said, smiling. ‘And a home. And I get fed.’ She explained that, fed up, she had just gone knocking on doors one day, asking if she could work for food and shelter.

‘And they let you?’ I was shocked. People had actually accepted her? I was such a long way from those early days when I had been treated similarly by a lovely waitress that the idea now seemed unthinkable.

She nodded happily. ‘Yes! Oh and, Pony Malta, you should see it. Their home is so lovely, and I have a lovely comfy bed. And it’s not just me. Several kids like us have done it.’

This was news to me, but then perhaps I’d been so blinded I couldn’t see it. I lived and breathed my gang to the exclusion of everything. There were people out there who would give work to hardened street kids?

‘It’s not permanent,’ Millie said. ‘They just use you and then you have to move on. Before this family I would work and get fed and maybe have one night or two. And you have to be prepared to do whatever they ask you. But it’s so much better. You should try it.’

My mind was whirring now. Could I do as she had? And have a bed and be given food again? But I was a different person now. A criminal. Who would trust me? ‘Wouldn’t they just slam their doors in my face?’ I asked her.

‘Some will,’ she said. ‘But if you’re lucky, some won’t. But, Pony Malta, you have to go alone. No one will even speak to you if you knock on doors with your gang. It has to be just you, or they’ll just be scared you’ll rob them.’

I felt a wave of disloyalty as I pondered what she’d said to me, especially towards weak Bayena and little Mimi, who’d have to fend for themselves. But not so much that it stopped me from wanting to try it. I had nothing to lose, after all.

It took a while for what at first seemed like a workable idea to transform into an actual plan of action. For all my bravado on the streets and my courage as a burglar, I was actually nervous about knocking on doors to ask for work. And perhaps I was right to be. After all, stealing is a private act, really. You do it alone, you do it for you, you seek no one’s approval. Speaking to strangers when you wanted something legitimate from them was asking them to judge you, and perhaps I wasn’t ready to make myself vulnerable like that.

But eventually my desire to find a better life wrestled my fear into submission, and once I was as clean and presentable as I could make myself, I set out on my mission.

I chose the El Callejón district of the city, as, from what Millie had said, it seemed the most likely option. It was the place where the people with money lived. I suggested to my gang that they might want to come with me, and at first we went together and tried lots of likely-looking houses. But, as Millie had warned me, it soon became obvious that, as a gang, we looked intimidating. People naturally distrusted groups of scraggy street kids, and we decided we might do better knocking separately. So that’s what we did – just saying a quick farewell in the street. No big deal. I didn’t know I’d never see any of them again.

It was a soul-destroying, miserable, thankless, lonely mission. I walked up and down street after street, footsore and thirsty from trudging in the heat. And everyone, without exception, still told me to go away. Disheartened, I decided I would simply give up – it seemed so pointless – but then a memory surfaced that took me by surprise. I remembered the first time I’d watched a monkey get a nut from its casing – how long it had taken and how hard he had worked. How he’d searched for the right rock, with a hollow to place the nut in – a job that in itself took a long time – and how he’d then found another rock and toiled away for so long, repeatedly hitting it till he was rewarded with that first small encouraging crack. Even then it took a lot more effort to break it open. The tastiest nuts didn’t give up their treasures lightly. You had to earn them. Just as I would have to earn this.

So I continued. I stuck at it day after day. There were many streets and many houses, and often no one was home anyway. It would be a good while before I exhausted the possibilities, and I vowed I wouldn’t abandon my mission till then.