Nobody's Child (6 page)

L
ife with Daddy was never what you could call predictable. His rages now came with little warning, and the level of damage he inflicted on both Mammy and myself varied in keeping with his mood swings. But, by the time I was six-and-a-half, I thought I knew all the telltale signs and could more or less recognise whether it was the mild or the malevolent Daddy who had come home to us.

Then he added a new factor to the battleground which was our home life and I was lost again.

He arrived home one evening with a carrier bag in hand and announced that he had bought us tea, even though it was well after the time we normally had our meal.

Mammy and I had already eaten our usual sandwiches, and I’d had a banana as well, and she told Daddy she wasn’t hungry at all.

‘You and Michael go ahead and eat,’ she said, and went back to dozing on the sofa.

Daddy fetched two plates and knives and forks from the kitchen and put them on the little table in the living room.

‘Come and sit down,’ he told me, and took a paper-wrapped packet out of the carrier bag.

The moment it was opened my heart sank. That Daddy should bring home food for our meal was unique in itself. With my luck, I might have known that he would have chosen something I couldn’t eat.

Fish and chips. Other children loved them, and I too enjoyed the chips and the batter wrapped around the fish. But I found the fish itself revolting. I had never liked its slimy texture, its taste or its smell.

Daddy, after adding salt and vinegar and tomato ketchup, tucked into his meal with obvious pleasure.

I took my time over the chips and picked at the batter, hoping that Daddy would finish quickly and go out. But, after he had eaten everything on his plate, he sat opposite me and stared at my remaining food. Eventually, there was no batter left and the white flesh sat untouched in the middle of my plate.

‘I want you to eat that up,’ he told me, pointing at the fish with his knife.

‘But I don’t like fish, Daddy,’ I said.

He stood up, came around the table and stood behind me and hissed, ‘Eat it now.’

I started to cry. Partly because I was scared at what Daddy might do next and partly in the slight hope that it would put him off. Tears had never saved me before but it still seemed worth a try.

He rapped me hard on top of the head with his knife and put his mouth right next to my ear and shouted, ‘Eat the bloody fish, you little bastard.’

‘I can’t,’ I shouted back.

‘We’ll see about that,’ he said, and slapped me hard on both sides of my head.

I screwed my head round to see if Mammy would come to my aid but Daddy was in the way. Suddenly, he grasped the hair at the back of my head and forced my mouth and nose into the fish. I kept my mouth shut but some of the fish was forced into my nostrils and, when I tried to breathe, I snorted some of it back into my throat. Mixed in with this was the feel and smell of blood. My nose had started to bleed when he had rammed it down on the plate.

My stomach reacted immediately and I felt the whoosh of sick in my mouth. But Daddy was pressing my head down so hard it couldn’t come out. And I couldn’t suck any air in either.

I started to hammer my fists up and down on the table top and bang my feet on the floor in terror, until at last he let go of my hair.

As I raised my face from the plate and opened my
mouth to breathe, all the sick shot out on to the plate and table before I could inhale. When I eventually sucked in some air, I deliberately blew it out down my nose to try to get rid of the fish that had lodged there.

Bits of fish and blood added to the filthy mess already in front of me and this brought a roar of anger from Daddy. He slapped my head back and forth with his open palm and then dragged me by my collar towards the fire.

I screamed, ‘Mammy, don’t let him burn me. Please don’t let him burn me,’ but she just sat there. Perhaps she had switched off when Daddy began shouting and didn’t understand what was happening, but I felt utterly abandoned.

And when I looked up at Daddy he was actually half smiling.

‘Let’s see if this will teach you to do as you’re told,’ he said.

I could feel the heat coming off the fire from several feet away and knew from the last time he had branded me just how awful the pain was going to be. At least I thought I did. But this time it was far worse than I’d imagined.

He pulled my shirt sleeve up my arm, tearing the button off the cuff with the force. Then, with both hands, he grasped my arm at the elbow and the wrist and pressed the middle bit against the top bar of the grate.

It sizzled and the hairs on my arm were singed away and there was a smell of me burning. I screamed and
screamed and wet my trousers. The pain was worse than anything that had ever happened to me before.

After a couple of seconds, Daddy pulled my arm away from the fire and pushed me towards the kitchen.

‘Stop that screaming, you dirty little brat,’ he shouted. ‘And get yourself cleaned up. You’re disgusting. When you’ve cleaned yourself up, then clean up the table and the floor where you’ve made a mess. You’re not fit to call a boy. You’re like a bloody animal, and that’s the way I’m going to treat you in future, like a bloody animal.’

After I had washed my face and changed my trousers for a dry pair, I got out a bucket and cloth and cleaned up the mess in the living room. My only relief came when I scraped the fish into the dustbin. At least I hadn’t given in. But at what a cost.

I quietly sobbed myself to sleep in the corner and later, after Daddy had led Mammy off to their bedroom, I went into the kitchen and found the remains of the burn ointment Mammy had got from the chemist after the first time Daddy had burned us.

I smeared it on my blistered arm and swore to myself that one day I would get my revenge – or run away.

Meanwhile I dreaded our next encounter, because, knowing Daddy, he would not let it end like this. Forcing me to eat food I hated was a new way of punishing me, and he wouldn’t stop after only one victory. Sure enough, attempts to force-feed me became a regular feature of our violent confrontations.

F
or me life was a battle for survival. I had no idea what Daddy was fighting for. Or why he had so much anger against Mammy and me. I told myself I must be the baddest boy in the world to warrant so much punishment.

In her rare lucid moments Mammy would try to reassure me. ‘You’re not really a bad boy, Michael,’ she would say. ‘Daddy doesn’t mean all the things he says and does. It’s just his rages. He gets so angry he doesn’t even realise he’s hurting you. Deep down he loves you really.’

But it was very hard to remember that Daddy loved me when he was in the middle of knocking me senseless or branding me on the grate.

Mammy also blamed Daddy’s drinking. She had been brought up strictly temperance, she told me. Which meant, she was proud to say, that alcohol had never passed her lips.

‘The devil is cunning and uses alcohol to gain easy entry into a drinking man’s mind,’ she said.

I think the devils who had such easy access to Daddy’s mind must have had a special dislike for Mammy and me, because I never heard of him hitting anyone else when he was drunk.

After the fish incident, Daddy made a point, at least once a week, of bringing home for my tea something that he knew I didn’t like. Brawn was his next choice. This cold meat dish, not eaten much outside the north of England, is made from all the unwanted and unmentionable bits of animals that no one would ever dream of eating. Guts, fat, gristle, bone and skin are cooked up and disgusting brown jelly holds it all together in a lump.

Mammy had once tried it out on me and my stomach had rebelled after just a tiny taste. Knowing this, Daddy bought some sliced brawn for my tea. He put two whole slices of the revolting concoction on a plate, which he ordered me to eat. There was lots of goodness in it, he told me with a nasty sneer.

‘So why aren’t you eating it as well?’ I asked him, and instantly regretted it. Daddy was the very last person who needed any provocation.

‘Don’t be so bloody cheeky,’ he snarled. ‘Get it down
you now or I’ll have to force it down and you won’t like that, I can tell you.’

This time I didn’t have Mammy for support or even as a silent witness. She had scuttled away downstairs to the shop moments after Daddy had appeared on the landing.

I didn’t blame her, because given the slightest chance I would have disappeared out of his way myself, and I knew quite well that she couldn’t have helped me anyway. It was just that, if she was sitting near by, even when she was drugged up and barely conscious, I didn’t feel quite so utterly alone and vulnerable.

I cut a small piece from one of the mosaic-like slices and speared it on the end of my fork. In the jelly were bits of skin with hair still on and it made me feel sick just to look at it. My stomach heaved at the thought of swallowing it, and I knew there was absolutely no way I was going to be able to put that horrid muck into my mouth.

So I simply sat there staring at it on the end of my raised fork, and I began to cry. Big tears tumbled down my cheeks and splashed on to the table. From experience, I knew that something very bad was going to happen and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I was very scared.

Daddy carried on glaring at me across the little table and then slowly, without looking, he reached down below table height as though he was feeling for something. Moments later, my dread leaped up several notches, when his hand reappeared holding his shiny black baton. He raised it all the way to shoulder height
and suddenly slammed it down on to the table with a bang. My plate jumped several inches in the air and I leaped up from my chair in sheer fright, then slowly sat again as Daddy placed his baton on my shoulder and pressed me down.

‘Now, are you going to eat your tea or do I have to find a way to feed you?’ Daddy asked in a fairly normal voice.

‘I can’t,’ I cried. ‘I just can’t eat it. I’ll be sick. Please don’t make me eat it.’

I didn’t expect him to take much notice of my pleas because he never did. But I certainly hadn’t anticipated what happened next.

My left hand was still holding the fork and my right hand was palm down on the table beside my plate.

Daddy simply raised the baton and, in one swift, deliberate movement, brought it crashing down on the back of my hand.

The shock forced all the breath out of me with a whoosh. Then came the pain, which seemed to race up my arm like something alive. I tucked my injured hand under my left armpit and began to cry with the agony.

‘You’re not eating,’ shouted Daddy over my sobs, his face inches from mine. ‘Better get started or I’ll give you something to really cry about.

The pain in my hand was already almost more than I could bear. ‘Please don’t hit me again, Daddy. It hurts so much,’ I begged.

‘Well, you know what to do about it,’ he told me calmly. ‘Eat your tea.’

I looked at the scrap which still hung from the end of my fork and I swallowed hard, willing myself to eat the offending morsel. But I still couldn’t do it. I knew I would be sick the moment it touched my tongue.

Daddy raised the baton again and I cringed in my seat waiting for another blow to my head or arms. I just hoped that it would knock me out so it would all be over with.

But he still had some surprises. He reached out his left hand and tore off a corner of one of the brawn slices on my plate, and pressed it on the rounded end of his baton. There was enough fat and jelly to make it stick there quite easily.

‘Open wide, you little bastard,’ he told me. ‘You’re going to eat this if I have to smash all your teeth to do it.’

By this time the pain and the panic combined were so much that I was no longer in control. I sat there, my body frozen, my mind seized up, unable to decide what to do.

Daddy decided for me. He suddenly stretched out his left hand and clamped his thumb and fingers over the end of my nose, squeezing it tightly. My mouth opened automatically as the air coming in through my nose was cut off, and Daddy pressed the end of his baton between my lips.

It was barred by my teeth, so he barked, ‘Open wide or I’ll knock your teeth down your throat, so help me.’

I was struggling to breathe and cry at the same time as little air was getting around the edge of the baton, and I opened my mouth as wide as it would go.

Daddy pushed the baton forward until its tip, with its covering of brawn, rammed against the back of my throat, stopping any air from getting in at all. I grabbed his left hand in both of mine and tried to prise his fingers off my nose.

At first he laughed. But I suppose he must finally have realised that he was choking me. Perhaps my face had turned bright red, because he suddenly released his grip on my nose and I was able to draw in some air.

But it was not enough. The baton had pushed back my tongue, and this and the brawn were now clogging my throat. I pushed against the table with both hands and finally my chair fell backwards and I followed it down, landing on my back with my head banging on the floor. But at least I had got free of the baton.

I spluttered and coughed and the piece of brawn shot out of my mouth as if from a catapult. My tongue felt swollen and sore and seemed to half-fill my mouth, and one of my teeth felt shaky.

All I could do was lie there on my back and suck in deep breaths in between sobs. I felt I had come very close to dying.

But Daddy hadn’t quite finished with me yet. My bare legs were up in the air still, horizontal to the floor and hooked over the front of the fallen chair.

He walked around the table and glared down at me. ‘You don’t seem to realise. This is for your own damned good,’ he told me, then he hit me hard with his baton twice, across my shins, just below my knees.

I couldn’t help it. I screamed so hard that I wet myself again. I had no control left at all, the pain was so awful. I began to whimper and at that moment I hated my father more than anything else in the world, and wanted him dead.

‘I hate you,’ I managed to gasp between sobs.

Daddy sneered at me. ‘And I hate you, you useless little bastard,’ he said, and grabbed me by the hair and hauled me to my feet. It felt, for a moment, as though he was going to pull off my scalp.

Then Daddy slapped me a final time, hard, across my face. ‘Get out of the house,’ he yelled. ‘I don’t want to see you. Get out.’

I half-stumbled, half-fell down the stairs and through the shop below, hoping to find a comforting pair of arms and someone to kiss away my pain.

But Mammy was sitting behind the counter, apparently asleep. If she knew what had been happening upstairs she never made a sign, though I was pretty certain she had chosen to escape into her drug world again rather than cope with yet another family drama. These days she was rarely there when I needed her most.

I was still crying and hurting badly from the blows to my head, legs and hand and was desperately in need of warmth and tenderness. I knew there was none to be had at home, so I went in search of comfort, out through our back yard and along the lane.

Two doors down was the home of a playmate whose mother, Betty, had always had a few words of kindness
and the odd hug for me, and I made my way through their yard, which like ours backed on to the lane.

When I walked through their back door, she took one look at me and gave a little cry of horror as she rushed forward and scooped me up in her arms. ‘Oh, God, Michael. What has that monster done to you now?’ she wailed.

‘I fell downstairs again,’ I sobbed. ‘That’s what happened. I fell downstairs again.’

‘Hush, my darling,’ she soothed, and sat down and began rocking me in her arms like a baby.

‘I’m sorry, I’ve wet myself,’ I sobbed.

She just hugged me closer and whispered, ‘That doesn’t matter, lovey. That doesn’t matter.’

I felt that, with her as my mother, Daddy would never have dared to hit me. But, instead of a proper mammy, I now had an almost permanent zombie as a parent, and I knew in my heart that somehow that would have to do.

For just a while longer, I snuggled closer into Betty’s arms and allowed myself to escape to a fantasy world where I was being cuddled and comforted by a loving, caring mother of my own.