We ate in the hotel’s restaurant every night, and afterwards went through to the lounge bar to watch the Spanish dancing for a while. Once or twice the handsome male dancer in tight black trousers pulled Mum up onto the dance floor. I shuddered as I imagined what Dad would do if he found out. Mum was much more outgoing on holiday. She chatted to people as if she didn’t have a care in the world, which she could never do at home.
One day we went out on a glass-bottomed boat and sailed to a small island with a beautiful white sandy beach and caves set back in the surrounding hills. I was in seventh heaven. Everything about it was special; even the air smelled different. The captain of our boat cooked a huge vat of paella, which he served on the beach at lunchtime, and it was the most delicious food I had ever tasted.
The holiday was special because there was no fear, but as the week drew to a close, I noticed the familiar weight of oppression beginning to settle again, and Mum started to return to her usual snappy self. I understood why. I knew it was because we would soon be going home to Dad and the anxiety was starting to set in. I felt it myself.
When we arrived back, Mum tried to be jolly to dissipate the thunderclouds that were brewing above Dad’s head.
‘Who’d you talk to then?’ he asked, looking at Mum and me in turn.
‘What d’ya mean, who did we talk to?’ said Mum, momentarily thrown by his question. ‘We didn’t talk to anybody.’
‘Who’d Mum and Lisa talk to, Kat?’ he said, spinning round to my five-year-old sister, who was sitting as unobtrusively as she possibly could in the corner. She looked confused at the question.
Dad asked her again, but louder, and I saw Kat struggle for a satisfactory answer. ‘Tony and Linda,’ she spluttered.
Tony and Linda had been the couple who sat at the next dining table and occasionally they’d lean over to Mum like the nice sociable couple they were and comment on the weather, or how they missed a nice cup of tea: ‘We forgot to bring our PG Tips.’
But Dad made it into something else entirely. ‘Who? Who the fuck’s Tony and Linda when they’re at home?’ he demanded, slamming his hand onto the smoked glass and chrome dining table.
‘Just people on the next table,’ said Mum.
‘Couple of fucking swingers, more like,’ said Dad. I could see he was working himself up into a frenzy.
Mum gave as good as she got, bolstered perhaps by the fact that Dad hadn’t hit her for a couple of years. ‘You’re bleedin’ mad, you are,’ she said. ‘And I think you’ve got a right bleed-in’ cheek an’ all, having a go at me. Especially after what you’ve done…’
Her eyes flickered over to me, and I knew she was talking about me. Feeling scared, I grabbed Kat’s hand, and tried to leave the room.
‘Where the fuck do you think you’re going?’ asked Dad, blocking my path.
‘Let them go,’ shouted Mum, her chest heaving up and down as if she were struggling for breath.
Dad looked into my eyes and said in a low voice, ‘I’ll talk to you later’ before stepping aside. I led Kat up to her bedroom where we started to unpack our suitcase. The happy carefree mood of the week before had been replaced with a sense of dread. The sound of Mum and Dad arguing echoed up the stairs. I tried to busy myself shaking sand from our flip-flops, and I felt like crying as I caught the scent of the sea mixed with coconut suntan lotion. Tears filled my eyes and suddenly Kat was at my side.
‘Dad’s always angry, isn’t he?’ she said, grabbing my hand in hers.
‘Don’t worry, Kat,’ I said, feeling so sad that she had to live in this house of hell. ‘It’ll be alright.’ I wished I could protect her, so she could have the normal childhood I had been denied, but the only chance of that happening would be if Mum broke up with Dad, and somehow I couldn’t see that happening.
Later the arguing calmed down and was replaced by the noise of the two of them having sex. I turned on the white clock/radio to drown it out, and Kat and I listened to Bucks Fizz singing ‘Making Your Mind Up’ instead.
In the weeks running up to the Florida holiday in August 1981, I felt a mix of emotions. A part of me was excited at the possibility of visiting Disney World and meeting Mickey Mouse, but my enthusiasm was quickly extinguished by the
thought of coping with Dad alone for three whole weeks. I also had the added worry of looking after Kat, and this responsibility weighed heavily on me. I tried to look at the positive side. There were times when Dad could be really nice. Admittedly his happy moods wouldn’t last for very long, were few and far between and as fragile as the finest gossamer, but seeing the way that Mum’s good side had come out while she was on holiday, I hoped he would be the same.
The night before we were due to leave, Mum looked more subdued than normal. After dinner I made sure we were alone for a few minutes and blurted out my worry: ‘What if Dad does something with Kat in the room?’ It was as close as I could go without actually saying the words that burned a hole in the tip of my tongue.
‘For fuck’s sake, Lisa,’ said Mum, clapping a hand to her head. ‘Just go upstairs, will you? As if I haven’t got enough to worry about.’
She didn’t want to talk about it. She was probably just hoping for the best, as I was. It wasn’t that I worried for myself–to a degree I was used to Dad’s behaviour–but I did wonder how Mum could possibly think about letting Kat go on holiday without her. I had never understood the excuse about her having to stay behind to work. Dad’s sister Lesley had been working alongside Mum for years and was more than capable of looking after the business for a while.
The day of the holiday came, and I couldn’t help feeling a little spark of excitement as we boarded the aeroplane. Things were fine for the first hour or two of the nine-hour flight. Dad was in Dr Jekyll mode, chatting amiably to the man sitting
across the aisle. I heard him say that he was divorced and taking his two children on a well-deserved holiday. He almost sounded as if he were a respectable father.
When the stewardess came round with the lunch trays, Dad ordered a large gin and tonic and I noticed him staring down the stewardess’s blouse when she leaned over to pour. After a few more drinks he began to tell everyone within earshot how he’d like to ‘give her one’. The man he had been chatting with earlier shifted sideways in his seat and turned to look the other way.
When we got to the hotel, I was relieved when Dad left Kat and me to unpack while he went to the bar. We didn’t see him again until the next morning, when I woke to find him lying on his bed stark naked. I quickly covered him with a sheet before Kat woke up. It was noon before he stirred. Kat and I had been restlessly pacing the room, waiting to get down to the beach, which lay spread beneath our hotel window. We were hungry and thirsty because we had missed dinner the night before, plus breakfast that morning. I found a packet of crisps in the flight bag and gave them to Kat to tide her over but we didn’t dare go downstairs ourselves without Dad’s permission.
However, over the next three weeks we had to go out on our own during the day, because once Dad woke up, he just wanted to go straight to the bar. Kat and I would spend our days out by the pool. I took care to protect her from the sun, making her wear a T-shirt or sit under an umbrella, because we didn’t have any suntan lotion. My fair skin was burnt to a crisp with huge water blisters across my shoulders and on my
forearms. It reminded me of the only other holiday I’d had with Dad, when I was seven. We went for a week to Benidorm in Spain just after he and Mum got married. They spent most of the holiday in bed, leaving Davie and me to play by the pool. By the end of the week my skin was burnt to a crisp, and another guest who was a nurse threatened to report Mum to the authorities for neglect.
The best thing about the Florida holiday was that Kat and I didn’t see Dad very much at all. The worst thing was that I would often wake up in the middle of the night to find him masturbating over me. He’d have lifted my nightie up to my waist and put the bedside lamp on to illuminate what was happening, but thankfully Kat always slept through it. So in a way, Dad did modify his behaviour during the holiday because Kat was there, but sometimes I could see what a struggle it was for him.
As the days progressed he became more and more bad-tempered. He would send me out to the diner on the corner to get him a hamburger and fries and despite the fact that I ran all the way back, it was never hot enough for him. He threw the polystyrene box containing his burger at the lemon-painted walls and slapped me from one side of the room to the other while Kat cowered in the corner. He then pinned me down on the bed and I could see that he was fighting the urge to unbutton his flies and force himself into my mouth, as he would have done at home. Thankfully he resisted. But the more he resisted those particular urges, the more violent he became.
Far from being an idyllic family holiday, the envy of all the kids at school, our three-week stay was turning into an
absolute nightmare. During the second week I noticed that Dad’s back was covered in scratches
‘I fucked that tour guide, last night,’ he said, twisting to study his back in the mirror. ‘She was a right fucking animal. Ripped me back to fucking shreds.’
I could feel him staring at me in the mirror, waiting for a response. I was determined not to look up or react in any way, because by now I was aware he thrived on my humiliation, embarrassment, tears and screams. But when he stumbled off to sit on the loo with a dirty magazine, I felt a solitary tear escape from the corner of my eye.
Kat came in from the balcony where she had been playing with her Sindy doll.
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.
‘Nothing,’ I said brushing it away. ‘I’ve got something in my eye.’
Dad made me sick to the pit of my stomach. I was weary of living a life filled with such debasement and degradation, and I wasn’t interested in hearing about his lurid encounters. My only wish was that he would go out and ‘get laid’ when we went home, because maybe then he would leave me alone. But I knew there was little chance of that, because he hardly left the house any more. I began to wonder if Mum didn’t prefer him to stay home and abuse me, rather than run off with some other woman and leave her? The thought made me shudder.
A day or two later, I was disappointed to find he had also been with the lovely waitress who served our dinner, and who was really nice to Kat and me. I thought to myself, ‘Little do you know who you’re dealing with.’
‘Now that’s what you call a good bunk-up,’ was how Dad summed up that particular liaison.
He spent most of the holiday bingeing on alcohol. One morning he told me he had been close to beating up a woman in a bar because he thought she had mocked him when he told her he was a cleaner. Seemingly she’d asked if he had a mop and bucket.
‘The ugly cunt came that close to getting my fucking glass in her boat-race.’
Other guests became concerned that we didn’t seem to have a responsible adult looking after us, and often had to call reception when they found us shivering in the hall outside our room, wet from the pool and locked out. Once a lady came and unlocked the door and when she pushed it open we saw Dad sprawled on the floor, unconscious, beside a pornographic magazine. I was so humiliated I couldn’t look at her.
‘Are you alright, honey?’ she asked. ‘Do you need to call your mommy?’
I couldn’t get rid of her fast enough, frightened that Dad would wake up and catch me talking to an ‘outsider’. He didn’t like us discussing our business with anyone.
It was a relief to go home at the end of the holiday. Dad told me in crude detail what he planned to do to me when we got back, so I knew I only had misery and pain to look forward to, but at least I wouldn’t have to worry about Kat any more. Mum would be able to do that.
As was his usual pattern, Dad spent the first few weeks back berating Mum for all the imaginary men she had been sleeping with while he was away. I wished I could find the
courage to tell her about all the women he had boasted of sleeping with in Florida, but I realised she wouldn’t do anything about it. She was like a broken mustang, all the spirit and fight beaten out of her. If the abuse of her own child didn’t move her, some waitress in a Florida diner wouldn’t either.
I
n the spring of 1982, I was becoming increasingly desperate. Dad’s relentless abuse of me made my life a living hell. My world was so narrow that I couldn’t see any avenue available to escape. And as if things weren’t bad enough, Dad had started to tell me that any day now he planned to ram his penis into me so hard that he would split me in half. He hadn’t penetrated me yet, but I knew the next stage in his long-term plan was almost upon me and that full-blown grown-up sex, like Mum had with him, was just around the corner.
As the abuse had progressed over the years, and he had done more and more vile things to me, I came to feel so tainted that I could hardly face going to school. Fear was so ingrained that it didn’t even occur to me to bunk off in case Dad found out and beat me up for daring to go anywhere without his consent. I had two choices: go to school and feel odd, dirty and weird amongst my classmates, or stay at home and suffer more abuse. Sometimes I stayed at home simply because I couldn’t bear to look at Karen and all the other girls whose lives appeared so pure and simple. I couldn’t bear to see what I was missing. It hurt me to listen to them talking about going to the cinema or the youth
club or being asked out on a date for the first time. I felt lonely and left out, as though I was a big freak of nature. In those days you didn’t hear stories about abuse, so I felt as if I was the only person in the world it was happening to.
When Mum came home from work every day at lunchtime, I could see she was annoyed that I was at home–not because she cared about my education, but because my presence irritated her. I’d hear her arguing with Dad about it.
‘Why ain’t she at school again?’ she said. ‘I’m sick of coming home and finding her here every day.’
‘It ain’t my fucking fault if she don’t want to go,’ Dad replied.