I Remember, Daddy (10 page)

I rarely visited my father when I was in my teens. When I did do so, there were always young girls hanging around the house drinking. Some of them were girls who went to my school and were just two or three years older than me, and my father – who was in his mid- to late forties – was sleeping with at least one of them, who was 15 years old. He used to show me a photo album that was full of pictures of young girls posing topless; and there was often a porn film showing on the TV when I arrived at his house.

As his gambling debts increased, he and Sally ended up living on just the bottom floor of the house, while he converted all the floors above into flats, which he let out to friends who were either single men or in the process of divorce. And I was employed – at the age of 12 – to clean for them. It was my father’s friend Angus who suggested it. He was a wheeler-dealer and apparently a very hard man in his day, although to me he was always just Uncle Angus, who tried to look after me in any way he could. He’d gone to live in one of my father’s flats when he separated from his wife, and he was sharing it with another man, an antiquarian bookseller whose ‘thing’ was having sex with under-age boys.

Angus gave me a key to the flat and I’d go there when they were out, at weekends and in the school holidays, to clean, wash the dishes and change the sheets on the beds. Like all the other flats in the house, it was a disgusting, filthy mess. But, even at the age of 12, I felt as though I’d seen it all and nothing could really faze me.

One day, my father told me he was going to have a party and he asked if I and a couple of my friends wanted to be waitresses. He gave us £20 each – which was a great deal of money to us at the time – and a few days later we arrived at his house and awaited our instructions.

For a couple of hours, we handed round drinks, smiling politely at the increasingly inappropriate comments made to us by my father’s lecherous friends and giggling together in the kitchen. Then, when everyone was already well on the way to being drunk, my father walked into the centre of the living room, pulling Sally with him, tapped his glass a few times to get everyone’s attention, and announced their engagement.

I hadn’t known anything about it and I was furious. It felt as though my father had tricked me into being there, to make it seem like I was okay with the idea of him marrying Sally. But I wasn’t okay with it, not least because I knew that – for reasons that didn’t make any sense to me – my mother would be devastated.

Whenever he had a party, my father used to fill the bath with ice and expensive bottles of champagne, and while everyone was still congratulating the happy couple, my two friends and I snuck into the bathroom, popped all the corks and then left the house. It felt good to have got my revenge on my father, although I don’t know if he ever realised how it had happened, because he was already drunk when the party started.

Not long afterwards, he and Sally were married in a beautiful Victorian Gothic church that was almost overflowing with wedding guests. Sally wore a white dress and walked slowly up the aisle beneath the soaring stone ceiling, flanked on either side by rows of smartly dressed local dignitaries – many of whom regularly attended my father’s parties – and their unsuspecting wives.

My mother didn’t want me to go to the wedding, but my father insisted and, for some reason I never understood, I cried the whole way through the ceremony. Then everyone piled out of the church and drove to an exclusive hotel, where they ate elaborately prepared and presented food, got drunk on costly champagne and acted as though the marriage of the wealthy businessman with whose young daughter some of them had shared a bed was an occurrence worthy of the heartiest congratulations.

Shortly after the wedding, my father sold the house that had been our family home and moved with Sally to a large detached house in the suburbs. There didn’t seem to be any point in going to visit him there. He was never affectionate towards me, and whenever I did see him he moaned and complained about my mother. But sometimes he insisted, although it was clear that he didn’t have any interest in being a father. We never did normal father/daughter things together, because everything was about him and what he wanted.

He did take me shopping one day, though. It was during one of the periods after my parents divorced when they were talking to each other and my mother had somehow managed to persuade him to buy me an outfit I desperately wanted, but that she couldn’t afford. I can remember counting the days until the Saturday and then running along behind my father as he strode to the store. I showed him the clothes I wanted and he took one look, laughed and walked away. I felt humiliated and embarrassed and so disappointed I had to bite the inside of my cheeks to prevent myself bursting into tears in the middle of the shop.

My father looked smugly satisfied, as though he’d done something clever, and when I didn’t answer him when he spoke to me, he accused me irritably of being sullen and ungrateful – although, as he’d bought me nothing, I couldn’t for the life of me think what I was supposed to be grateful for.

I trailed miserably after him to all the shops he wanted to go to, and then we met up with his friend Angus, who must have seen how disappointed I was and felt sorry for me, because he bought me a pair of shoes and some boots and ignored my father’s shoulder-shrugging sneers.

I had very little contact with my brother throughout my childhood. He was away at boarding school during term time, and in the holidays he stayed with friends or with my father. I knew my mother loved us both, but that she loved my brother most and that seeing him so rarely made her miserable. She continued to drink at the weekends, sometimes quite heavily, and when she was drunk she’d cry and say, ‘I worked so hard to bring you and your brother up and now my life is terrible. Your father is so awful to me, after everything I’ve done for him …’

To me, they seemed to be tirades of self-pitying justification, and I dreaded them. I hated myself and I hated my life, and I had very little sympathy for anyone else’s misery, perhaps particularly my mother’s. As soon as she started to moan, I’d interrupt her by saying, ‘For God’s sake get your act together,’ and she’d look at me reproachfully and take another sip of her drink.

Then, one day, she met someone and her life was transformed almost overnight.

My mother was in her forties and Paul was at least 15 years younger than she was. But he had a good job and he treated her really well. I felt pleased for her, because it seemed that she’d finally found a purpose to her life. She stopped drinking and gained a confidence that I didn’t remember ever seeing in her before, and after a while Paul moved in to live with us.

He was kind to me and he made it clear that he knew how I might feel about having someone else living in the flat I was used to sharing with just my mother. I liked him, though, and I could see what a difference he was making to my mother’s life. So I was almost as happy to have him there as she was.

Then, one morning, he went to work as usual and never came back. My mother was devastated. It was as though someone had flicked a switch that had turned off the light he’d lit inside her. You could actually see the hurt in her eyes, and I didn’t know what to say to her. So I took the coward’s way out and tried to avoid saying anything at all. I don’t know why I was surprised about what had happened, because I’d already learned that everything ends in tears and that even when someone appears to love you and care about you, they really don’t. But that wasn’t something I was able to talk about with my mother.

She didn’t see or hear from Paul again until she bumped into him one day in town, years later. She asked him what had happened, what she’d done that had made him walk out on her when things seemed to be going so well between them. And he told her that his friends had teased him about their relationship, and had kept saying, ‘Just imagine when she’s 50 and you’re only … Or when she’s 60 and you’re …’

He’d hated their constant jibes and had eventually allowed them to convince him that his relationship with my mother would never work out. He’d known how heartbroken she would be, how she’d lose all the confidence she’d gained from feeling that he loved her, and he hadn’t been able to find the words to tell her. So he’d said nothing at all.

I don’t think my mother ever really recovered from the hurt she felt about what Paul had done, and although she had other boyfriends after him, she never let anyone get so close to her again.

It was a feeling I understood, and I shared my mother’s reluctance to trust anyone. By the age of 12, with just one happy memory – of the summer holiday I’d spent with my grandparents – I was on the verge of becoming a deeply unhappy teenager. I’d already suppressed the memories of the sexual abuse I’d suffered at the hands of my father and his friends. So I was left with an immutable, deeply rooted feeling that I was different from all the other girls I knew, and that I was unlovable, for reasons I didn’t understand.

When I did something odd – which happened often – people used to say, ‘Oh, you’re mad!’ And I really thought I was. I had suicidal thoughts every single day and I can remember one day when I was 12 feeling such a profound sense of despair that I looked out of the window of the flat I lived in with my mother and thought, ‘I could just finish it now. All I have to do is open the window and jump.’

But it seemed as though I was too useless even to do that.

I
was a horrible teenager. I drank and smoked and had an anger inside me that was far beyond the usual teenage angst. I kept it bottled up, though, most of the time. The face I presented to the outside world was one of indifference and I think most people just thought I was odd and disaffected – and perhaps that’s what made me an easy target for the school bullies. And once the bullying starts, it becomes a vicious circle: the more I was bullied, the angrier I became; and the angrier I was, the more oddly I behaved; so then I was bullied even more …

On one occasion, I was thrown over a wall by a couple of girls. I was skinny and small for my age, and they just picked me up bodily and tossed me over it. I was bruised and cut, but otherwise not badly hurt, physically at least. Another time my head was pushed down into the bowl of a toilet, which was then flushed repeatedly, until I thought I really was going to drown. And one day some girls held me down while another one cut the hair off on one side of my head. I had to have all my hair cut short after that, and when my father saw it, he was furious. He’d always insisted that my hair should be allowed to grow, and it had been long ever since I was a very little girl. I hated it short too, because as well as being skinny, I’d remained flatchested long after all the other girls had started to develop, so all it took to make me look like a boy – and, in my mind at least, even uglier than I already felt – was a boy’s haircut.

Understandably perhaps, I hated school. I’d drag my feet along the pavement every morning, praying that something – anything – would happen so that I wouldn’t ever arrive at the school gates, and feeling increasingly sick and anxious with every step I took. I dreaded waking up in the mornings so much that, eventually, I stopped going to school at all. For six months, I got up at the same time every weekday as I’d always done, got dressed in my school uniform, had my breakfast and left the house at the usual time. But, instead of going to school, I’d walk to the local swimming pool, where I’d sit for hours, watching people swimming.

My mother never suspected a thing. So she was completely surprised and shocked when the authorities contacted her and said, ‘Your daughter hasn’t been going to school for weeks.’ I think by that time, though, my anger and odd behaviour had already worn her down and, as she’d never been very good at handling crises anyway, she phoned my father and said, ‘I can’t deal with her. You’re going to have to do something.’

That’s when my father finally agreed to put his hand in his pocket and pay for something that might be of help to me, and I started attending a private girls’ school. I failed my entrance exam, and presumably my father had to pull some strings and call in a few favours to get me in at all. And then things didn’t get off to a great start, because I’d missed so much at my last school that I was put in the class below the one I should have been in. It was clear that I had a lot to catch up on, and when everyone else was doing PE, I had to do extra maths and – ironically, in view of all those fables I’d learned – French tuition.

To me, it all seemed like a huge waste of energy and I couldn’t really be bothered. I realise now that my lethargy was born of depression. But, at the time, I just accepted the view of most of my teachers – that I was lazy and perhaps a bit stupid.

Another thing that didn’t help my situation at the school was the fact that my father never paid the fees on time, if at all. He was always a term or two behind with the payments, which were often made in the end by my mother’s parents to avoid my being kicked out. At the time, I probably didn’t thank them for intervening to keep me there, although I think I did realise that I might be running out of options if I was asked to leave.

Unfortunately, though, the fact that my father was paying school fees for me – nominally if not always in reality – meant that he began to take more of an active interest in my academic progress, or lack of it. One day, after seeing my end-of-term report, he summoned me to his house. Why he was particularly enraged on that occasion I don’t know, because all my reports were pretty bad.

My friend Megan went with me for moral support, and because I hoped my father might not rant and rave so much if someone else was there with me. But, almost as soon as we walked into his house, he flew into a rage and started screaming and swearing at me.

‘I’m paying all that money to give you a decent education,’ he bellowed, without even the slightest hint of irony or embarrassment, ‘and all you can do is fuck about wasting your time and everyone else’s. Perhaps you’re just stupid. I’ve always suspected you probably were.’

He was working himself up into an even worse temper and I was finding it increasingly difficult to look as though I didn’t care and wasn’t afraid.

‘The truth is that you’re a lazy little slut,’ he shouted, punching my shoulder with his clenched fist and sending me toppling backwards against the kitchen table. ‘Get out! Go on, get out of my house!’

Megan was terrified. She gave a little whimper and scurried ahead of me to the front door, where she glanced quickly at me over her shoulder before running down the stone steps on to the pavement. I was just stepping out through the doorway behind her when my father suddenly grabbed hold of me with both hands and flung me down the steps, head first.

Megan gave a squeal of alarm as my face hit the pavement, and when I stood up again she was looking at me, wide-eyed with shock and with her hand over her mouth. The skin on my face was scraped and bleeding and I could taste the metallic taste of blood in my mouth. But I was determined not to give my father the satisfaction of seeing that I was hurt. So I turned away from him and walked down the road beside Megan, limping slightly, with my back straight and my head held high.

In many ways, I hated the new school even more than I’d hated the last one. I’d been used to wearing miniskirts and make-up, and I loathed having to put on my horrible, ugly school uniform every morning. There was one thing that was better there than it had been at my previous school though, and that was the fact that I was no longer bullied. Instead, I became the bully. I didn’t do anything too terrible – no throwing people over walls or flushing their heads down toilets. It was just that, as almost all the other girls were nicely behaved, respectful and obedient – at least when the teachers were around – my rebellious anger made them instinctively wary of me, and I exploited their wariness.

I set up an ear-piercing business in the toilets, for which I charged £1 a time, and I had plenty of takers. I smoked, I stole from the local shop, and then I began to realise I was becoming someone I didn’t recognise. I was doing things that weren’t really me, although I didn’t know why I was doing them and I didn’t know how to stop. It felt as though I could never drop my guard, because I was always fighting an invisible enemy.

I still thought everything bad that ever happened to me was my fault. People say that good things happen to good people, so it seemed to make sense that bad things only happen to you if you’re a bad person. I know now that that isn’t true – good and bad things happen to anyone. But, at the time, whenever anything went wrong for me, I thought I was being punished and that I deserved to be miserable and depressed.

I used to wish there was someone who could help me. I think if there’d been a ChildLine or something similar in those days, I’d definitely have called them, if only to ask whether they thought I was really mad, as I strongly suspected I was. There was no one to talk to, though, and no one to ask for advice. So I drank and smoked and told myself I didn’t care.

The first time I got really drunk was when I was 13. I was at a party at a friend’s house and we raided her parents’ drinks cupboard. I drank a whole bottle of Pernod, and a couple of my friends had to half-drag, half-carry me home, where they dropped me on the ground outside the front door, rang the bell of the flat and ran away. I was really sick. My mother called the doctor, who said I had alcohol poisoning, and I was in bed for three days.

You’d have thought an experience like that might have made me vow never to touch alcohol again, but it didn’t. I started going to pubs after that. How I ever got served I don’t know, because I really did look like a young boy. I’d usually go with Jenny, who was pretty and looked older, and who was the one who went up to the bar to buy the drinks. By the time we were 14, we were going to pubs and clubs every Friday and Saturday night, drinking copious amounts of cider and Babycham, and getting drunk.

My mother knew I was drinking and smoking, but she didn’t say anything to try to stop me. I think she was just thankful I was coming home at night, and not hanging out on street corners. And she knew I’d do it anyway, whatever she said to me. Perhaps, too, she was grateful for the fact that I was starting to enjoy my life – for the first time that I could remember.

I began to make lots of friends – mostly girls from other schools – and I ended up staying with one of them for a while. Her name was Julia. I shared her bedroom in the flat she lived in with her mother, who often worked away from the city for days at a time, leaving us with the place to ourselves, and who let us do pretty much what we wanted even when she was there. When she wasn’t, we’d hold parties and cook bacon and eggs for breakfast and pretend we were adults living an exciting, independent life.

I was still rebellious and strange-looking. Like a lot of young people I think, I felt unattractive, so I tried to make my ‘oddness’ seem like a positive choice by wearing unconventional clothes and outlandish makeup. There must have been a childlike vulnerability visible beneath my tough exterior, though, because Julia’s mother – as well as the mothers of some of my other friends – felt sorry for me and treated me like an adopted daughter.

There was a group of about 40 of us from different schools who’d meet up every weekend to drink and talk about the boys we were madly in love with that particular week. I was never one of the most popular girls; that honour belonged to two tall, slim, stunningly beautiful girls who were lusted after by all the boys. But I was part of their circle, and I could never quite believe how lucky I was. It felt as though I was part of something at last and, at the weekends at least, I was sometimes almost happy.

Weekdays were a different story, though, and I still did stupid things that were almost designed to get me into trouble and to test to the limits the tolerance of the school, as well as of my mother.

After school sometimes, I’d go with my friend Lucinda to a local record shop, where we’d steal little metal badges that were popular at the time and that everyone used to buy to pin on their school bags. Eventually, we’d taken so many we had to hide them, and we put them in Lucinda’s desk at school, which is where they were when, one day, without thinking, Lucinda opened the lid of her desk just as the teacher came to stand beside her.

‘Well, well, what have we here?’ the teacher asked, picking up a handful of the badges and letting them slip through her fingers. ‘Where did these come from?’

‘From the shop, Miss.’ Lucinda looked down at her desk.

‘I realise that, Lucinda.’ The teacher’s tone was sarcastic. ‘I didn’t imagine for one moment that you’d done anything as industrious as making them yourself, or that you’d found them hanging on a tree somewhere. To whom do they belong?’

Lucinda glanced sideways towards me and pulled an apologetic face before answering, ‘They’re mine, Miss. And Katie’s.’

‘I see.’ The teacher was one of several who didn’t like me, and she gave a small, satisfied smile. ‘So, let me repeat my original question. Where did these come from? Did you and Katie purchase them yourselves, with your own hard-earned money?’

‘No, Miss. We …’ Lucinda’s face was red with embarrassment and shame. ‘We nicked them, Miss.’

A brief ripple of laughter ran around the classroom, punctuated by gasps from a couple of the girls who were more easily shocked. I doubt, though, whether anyone was really surprised to discover that I was a shoplifter, as I’m sure that, in their minds, it was just one short step from non-conformity to theft.

‘Silence!’ the teacher roared, turning to glare ferociously around the room. ‘This is no laughing matter. Stealing is a very serious, criminal, offence.’ She scowled at me as she emphasised the word, and then added, ‘You will stay behind at the end of the lesson – both of you.’

After school, Lucinda and I went to the record shop with our teacher to return the stolen badges and apologise. Luckily, the manager of the shop decided not to prosecute us, although he did ban us from the premises – ‘for ever’ – and I was expelled from school.

In fact, it wasn’t the first time I’d been expelled – nor was it to be the last – and, as on all the previous occasions, I was allowed back after my father sent the school a substantial cheque. I think there were quite a few teachers who must have wished he had less money, because most of them hated me, probably with good reason. It was a school with traditional values and rules and, in addition to not doing very well academically, I used to turn up in the mornings wearing makeup, with my hair dyed lurid colours and the top of my skirt rolled up around my waist, transforming it from sedate knee-length uniform into a strip of material that only just covered my bottom. I saw my behaviour as expressing my quirky individuality and my refusal blindly to conform. But I know that, to most of my teachers, I was just a tiresome pain in the neck.

I think the headmistress liked me, though. Whenever she saw me on the street wearing make-up that was far too obvious to be ignored or a non-regulation scarf or jacket, she’d sigh and say, ‘Katie. My office. Tomorrow.’ Then she’d wait patiently as I took off the offending object and put it into her outstretched hand. But the corners of her mouth would always twitch, as though she was suppressing a smile, and her eyes would be amused and kind rather than angrily impatient, as the other teachers always were. And I think that, even when my father was late paying my school fees, the headmistress always fought my corner.

The teacher I hated more than anyone was my geography teacher, primarily because she made it very clear in every way possible that she hated me. She was always telling me, ‘You’ll never do well in life.’ But, however hard I worked to try to prove to her that I wasn’t lazy and useless, she refused to acknowledge my efforts.