Daddy's Prisoner (7 page)

Simon was only a year younger than me so I didn’t look after him much and he spent hours alone in his room dismantling old electrical gadgets, like a top-loading video recorder, before putting them back together again. Meanwhile I was usually so tired after running around with the kids that all I wanted was to sleep at the end of a day. Even that was hard, though, because while Laura and Kate were supposed to share the queen-sized bed in our room while I had a single, we’d all end up together in the big bed when they got scared and I’d cuddle them as the shouts downstairs rattled through the floor.

When he got older, Charlie would also crawl in with us and I’d spend the night getting up to put him back into his bed before feeling him sneak back in soon after. I didn’t have the heart to keep moving him but always made sure he was back in his own bed by morning because The Idiot hated him being in with me.

I looked after the kids even more after Michael went. Mum was busy as usual looking after The Idiot and I found that if I kept running after the little ones until I finally fell into bed then I wouldn’t think too much about Michael. I missed him so much even though I knew he’d done what he had to. Looking after the children helped me forget the ache in my stomach for him and also made me feel close to Mum because I knew she missed Michael as well. Dad wouldn’t hear his name spoken and occasionally when the phone went, she’d whisper quietly into the receiver until The Idiot realised who it was and told her to hang up.

‘You’ll have nothing to do with him,’ he’d scream. ‘He’s gone and that’s it. You’ll be sorry if I catch you talking to him again.’

Mum never argued back and I understood why she didn’t as I got older and began to see the thousand different ways he controlled and humiliated her – like making her sit on the end of his bed for hour after hour, ready to be at his beck and call whenever he needed her, or making her wait for an hour when she asked for a cigarette before throwing it at her, or telling her to shut up until he allowed her to speak. He was like a puppet master who pulled her strings whenever he felt like being cruel and I never heard a kind word come out of his mouth. It was always ‘fat bitch’ this or ‘stupid cow’ that and Mum’s strength to stand up to it slowly drained away as her health got worse. By now, as well as the bladder problems she’d developed after having all of us, her chest was bad and she took pills for a thyroid complaint.

Because Mum was weak and ill, I tried to do as much as I could for her – looking after her almost like I looked after the kids. There were moments when we were alone together and I made her happy as we smiled about one of the kids’ latest jokes or bought pound presents for Christmases and birthdays. Then we were just like any other mother and daughter and I knew I would do anything to protect her. But at night I would silently cry as I heard muffled screams. Mum never spoke about it but I knew she and I were the same: Dad hurt her hidden behind closed doors just like me. Sometimes I’d ask her how she’d got the bruises and she’d tell me she’d banged into a door, or I’d find her crying in the kitchen.

‘Are you okay?’ I asked as she wiped her eyes.

‘I’m fine, darling,’ she’d tell me as she tried to smile.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, of course. I’m just a bit tired. I need a good night’s sleep and I’ll be fine. Now why don’t you help me get the tea on?’

But then came a day when Dad lost control and I saw for the first time just how vicious he was on all those nights when I heard the shouting. It was after Michael had left home and a phone call came to say he was leaving Granny Ruby’s to go and stay with one of The Idiot’s sisters. He went wild.

‘She’s not going to take him in,’ he yelled. ‘He’s not going anywhere near my family. He can look after himself.’

‘At least we’ll know where he is,’ Mum said quietly.

‘I don’t give a fuck where he is and neither should you. I don’t want to hear any more about him.’

‘But I want to know he’s safe.’

Dad lurched towards Mum as he roared: ‘How dare you? That bastard is dead to us.’

Raising his hand, he slapped her across the face before punching her in the stomach. I stared in horror as Mum’s breath was knocked out and she stumbled back. I wanted to run to her, stop him from hurting her but suddenly Dad turned around and yelled at me to get out. The look in his eyes told me I had to do as he said.

Panic filled me as I lay on my bed listening to the shouts and it seemed like for ever until she finally climbed the stairs. Mum looked as if she’d been crying as she walked into my room and there was a red mark on her face where she’d been slapped.

I started sobbing as she sat down beside me.

‘What are we going to do?’ I whispered.

She pushed my hair out of my face and patted my hand.

‘Stay out of his way,’ she replied.

Her voice was flat. No sing-song in it, no laughter, no warmth. Just lifeless.

‘But can’t we go and find Michael? Live with him?’

‘He’s just a boy, love. He can’t help us.’

‘There must be somewhere we can go. Anywhere. Just get away.’

Mum looked at me quietly.

‘Where? We’ve got nothing or no one. He’s made sure of that.’

I don’t know if it was because Michael had left or whether my new school had contacted them, but soon the social workers came back into our lives again. Once again, I was spotted as the needy one in class and given clean clothes to wear. Of course, the teachers soon realised what my dad was like and I had to hand the clothes back in at the end of each day, otherwise he’d swipe them. There were only so many times I could lie that they had been lost and I’d bring them back on a tomorrow which never came. Dad was so mean, he’d take anything he could get for free and I even had to start hiding from my cookery teacher because week after week I’d take home food that he’d eat before refusing to pay the 50p we were asked to give for the ingredients.

Just as I had been when I was younger, I was an outsider with few friends – the only ones I really made were twin sisters called Lucy and Sarah. Lucy had been badly burned in a fire when she was young and got picked on just like me so we stuck together. She didn’t mind the way I was and I didn’t mind the way she was. I knew her scars were on the outside while mine were hidden. Lucy had to have skin grafts to try to repair her scars, which she said were very painful as she described the treatments she had at hospital.

‘So why do you do it?’ I asked one day.

‘Because I have to if I want a normal body and a normal life,’ she replied, and I wished there was a treatment that could make me whole again.

Maths and reading were the subjects I liked best but I didn’t really try in classes like geography because after a lifetime of being told how useless I was, I knew I was too stupid to understand them. There were some subjects I didn’t even get a chance to do, though, like gym or swimming because The Idiot didn’t want me wearing a short skirt or a swimming costume.

‘Stay away from those idiot boys at school,’ he’d tell me when we were alone together. ‘Because if I ever catch you with one of them then I’ll make you pay.’

Mum tried to tell him that I had to do sport but he refused to listen. I never learned to swim or ride a bike and took notes into school excusing me from gym. In fact, I didn’t do any of the things the other girls in my class did but no one seemed to really notice. Sometimes I thought someone would, an adult would see how withdrawn and uncommunicative I was and want to find out why. But there was just one teacher who once asked me if I had any problems at home. I didn’t really know her very well so I told her I was fine because in a way it was true. At least when I was at school, I wasn’t at home with him and I could dream in peace of being a nurse or an air hostess, who flew off to the places I read about in books. But the moment school ended, I knew I was his again as the chains he was slowly wrapping around me clamped tighter and I ran home.

At the end of each day I’d leave lessons five minutes early, run down the corridor to the changing room and rip off the clothes I’d been lent that morning so I could leave school the moment the bell went. Then I’d rush home without stopping to chat to Lucy because otherwise The Idiot would ask questions about why I was late. The leash he kept me on was tightening all the time and after Michael went, I was told to stay in the house more and more. Where I’d once been allowed out, I was now told to keep in; if I was sent to the shop, I had to come straight back; if I tried to go out and play with the little ones, I’d be told to get inside. My father was starting to build a prison around me but I had no idea what he was doing as the bars enclosed me. I was just a child and woke up with just one thought each morning: that he would not call me to see him today and force me down on to the bed again.

No one else noticed what he was doing – not even the social worker who visited one afternoon when I’d just got back from school. The woman who knocked on our door looked like an old hag with a severe face and grey hair and I could see she was dying to get out of our house almost as soon as she stepped into it. After looking at the toilet, which was filthy with mess that had built up because we weren’t allowed to flush it at night, she opened the doors to our bedrooms to find wet mattresses and excrement-stained clothes. The stench of urine washed over her and, holding a hand in front of her mouth and nose, the woman blinked her eyes rapidly as the bitter smell burned into them.

‘You’re going to have to help your mother,’ she said as she looked down at me. ‘She can’t do it all.’

The social worker must have stayed all of fifteen minutes before she left and Dad was furious we’d been found again. He was told the house needed cleaning up and so he went out to buy pine disinfectant and Brillo pads, which Mum and I used to scrub the bad bits off the carpets. We pulled mouldy clothes out of cupboards, threw old newspapers away and collected up all the dirty nappies I’d tried to keep in a bin but which had been scattered around. We cleaned up food trodden into the carpet, tossed stained clothes into bin bags and picked up ripped underwear off the floor. When it was finally done, The Idiot came to inspect our work and opened cupboard doors and drawers to see if it was all to his liking. To be honest, I didn’t know how to clean a house properly because I’d never lived in something that a normal person would consider habitable, so I hadn’t done a good job and neither had Mum. But Dad’s standards were so low that he’d have thought a pigsty was a palace and he seemed pleased.

‘Just make sure it stays this way,’ he said. ‘I don’t want those social work bastards back in this house again.’

It was always the same: The Idiot did everything he could to stop anyone entering the world he had created for us and we moved on whenever there was too bad a fight with a neighbour. No one ever knew us well enough to look too closely at what was happening behind our front door and I was like every other abused child – believing I must deserve it if something terrible was happening to me week in and week out and no one noticed the pain I was in.

Charlie was four and I was fourteen when I got called out from class one day and told I had to go and pick him up. I’d dropped him off as usual at nursery earlier that day so I wondered what had happened as I walked to get him. When I got there I was told Charlie had bitten a little Indian girl so badly his teeth had sunk through her tights and into her skin.

‘You’re going to have to ask your parents to come and see me about this,’ the head of the nursery told me. ‘I really don’t think we can cope with Charlie any more. He’s so disruptive, so unruly and this really is the last straw.’

I knew Charlie was wild. Even at such a young age, he swore and cursed because he’d heard The Idiot do it so much. After a lifetime of seeing horror films on the TV and watching the real-life slaps, he used to hit me without reason and lash out when he lost his temper. But at other times, he acted like the little boy he still was and cuddled up to Mum and me until Dad told us to put him down.

‘Do you want to make him soft?’ he’d snarl.

I wondered what would happen to Charlie now. Mum wouldn’t be able to look after him properly at home so he’d be left to fend for himself until he was old enough to go to school like us older kids.

The Idiot was annoyed, of course, when I told him what had happened. Charlie getting expelled was another bit of trouble for him so he made sure my little brother got a good smack to know he wasn’t pleased. But in the next breath, he started laughing as he looked at him.

‘That’s my boy,’ he crowed. ‘You got the Paki bastard good and proper.’

Charlie looked up at him, not knowing if he’d done good or bad. He was too young to understand that my father was so racist he refused to even step into the local shop because it was run by an Indian family. He said anyone with a skin darker than his was a robbing bastard and would always park outside while I ran in to get what he wanted.

But even though The Idiot enjoyed Charlie’s attack on the little girl, he soon realised his expulsion was going to cause a problem. No other nursery would take him and Dad’s solution was simple: I’d have to stop going to school so much and look after my youngest brother. It was the perfect excuse for him to keep me away from the one place where he knew I might make friends and find a way to break his spell over me. School was the only escape I had and now he could stop me from going because if anyone asked, all he had to say was that I was needed at home. My mum was sick and I had a baby brother to look after.