I’d stand in the bathroom and stare at myself in the mirror as they argued downstairs, and I’d feel so frustrated with the injustice of it all that I’d want to smash my face in the glass until nothing was left where my features used to be. It was getting to the stage where I could barely look at myself any more. After Mum made a fuss, I’d try to make sure I went to school every day for the next week or so. But I was caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, because Dad would often fly into a rage and make me stay at home. I don’t know whether he planned this, as he had planned everything else, but he succeeded in driving an even bigger wedge between me and my mother, one that would be virtually impossible to bridge.
In preparation for the day when we would finally have penetrative sex, he began to simulate it, by arranging me into positions where he could place his penis between my legs. I’d have to bend over in front of him and squeeze my legs shut on
his penis while he moved back and forth, or he would make me lie on my back on the sofa while he knelt in front of me and hooked my legs over his shoulders. I often used to cry on these occasions, especially when he ‘accidentally’ penetrated my anus, which was very shocking and painful.
‘I bet you’ve got a nice tight pussy. I’m going to split you in half,’ was his favourite turn of phrase, and he made it clear to me that he wasn’t prepared to wait much longer for this to happen.
Yet at other times, our relationship remained very much one of strict dad and subservient daughter. Not that he possessed any positive fatherly qualities; it was rather that he liked to be in control and was good at laying down ground rules. I was treated as a child, just as Kat was. No smoking, no swearing, no make-up or grown-up clothes, different food from Mum and Dad because I couldn’t possibly handle a hot curry. I was painfully aware that in many ways the girls at school were much more grown-up and worldly-wise than I was. My development had been retarded because I wasn’t allowed to grow up normally, and I didn’t know what it was to be a normal teenager. So in every way but the vile abuse I suffered on a daily basis, Dad treated me as if I were his daughter, and much younger than I actually was. Perhaps for this reason, I found it hard to believe he would go so far as to take my virginity. Surely that was too drastic a step even for him? I felt the dread and fear overtake me every day, but deep down I always hoped he would stop himself at the last moment. I convinced myself that if he hadn’t done it by now, he never would.
But I was wrong. He was simply biding his time. He obviously hoped that all the previous abuses he’d inflicted on me over the years would somehow pave the way and make it easier for him.
I was so shocked when he finally tried to enter me that I became almost hysterical. I uttered a piercing scream and cried and begged him not to, it hurt so much. Of all the pain I had felt in all the years I had been abused by him, this was by far the worst.
For the first time ever I saw a look of doubt pass over his face. My reaction had frightened him. In the past the threat of his violence had meant I hadn’t dared to put up too much of a fight, but this time it felt as though he was trying to kill me and I couldn’t control my fear. I knew in my head I shouldn’t disobey him in case he started hitting me, but I couldn’t stop myself writhing in agony and resisting in any way I could. Eventually he stopped trying and zipped his flies back up.
I hoped this meant he had given up on the idea–but no. If anything he became even more determined and tried to enter me every day. He’d send Mum over to the shop or on some other errand, if she wasn’t already at work, or he’d take me cleaning with him at the weekend, just the two of us. There he would escort me into a bathroom and lift me up onto a sink to try and lower me down onto his penis, but my body was so tense that he couldn’t get it in at all. I was surprised that he wasn’t getting angry or lashing out in the way he normally would if I wasn’t being compliant. If anything he was being nicer than I’d known him to be in a long time. He told me that he loved me and that I was the most special girl in the world.
He mopped my tears really tenderly and for a moment I thought it was all a bad dream. I fantasised that he was a real and proper dad, someone who didn’t want to abuse or rape me, but my reverie was shattered in the next moment as he tried once again to force his penis into my vagina.
Nothing was working and gradually he started reverting to type, his anger and frustration bubbling to the surface. He was used to getting what he wanted and soon he started to hit me again. By this stage I just wanted it to be over. I knew he would get his way eventually, so I tried to relax and escape in my mind the way I used to. But there was no fooling my body, which responded to the revulsion I felt by going into a sort of lockdown spasm. I couldn’t pretend to myself that what he was doing was OK, because it wasn’t. Instinctively I knew the only thing holding him back from raping me in the swift, brutal way you read about in newspapers was his own fear of being caught. I was barely fifteen, his stepdaughter, and he was worried because my show of resistance had caught him unawares. Could he really be sure I wouldn’t run screaming to the police?
He had always been a betting man, and now it was time for him to take the biggest gamble of his life.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ he snapped one day, digging his fingers into the flesh of my hips. ‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘I don’t want to,’ I whispered. ‘I don’t want to.’
‘What?’ he demanded, full of threat and menace, even though I knew he’d heard me clearly. ‘What did you fucking say?’
‘Nothing. It hurts.’
Suddenly, after keeping his anger contained for the best part of three weeks while he tried and failed to achieve penetration, he exploded into action. ‘Don’t give me all that, you little fucker,’ he shouted, kicking and stamping on my legs and feet where I lay on the front room floor.
He grabbed a fistful of hair and T-shirt in one hand and dragged me upstairs to his bedroom. Mum was out. He threw two towels on the bed, as he normally did whenever he tried to enter me, telling me they were ‘for all the blood’. I started to shake so much I could hear my teeth chattering. With one swift movement he removed my skirt, which was bunched up around my waist. I clamped my hands over my T-shirt as if my life depended on it. I couldn’t bear him to see me completely naked. It always made everything seem so much worse. Then he produced a paper bag containing a tube of KY Jelly and a packet of Durex condoms. He put one of the condoms on and rubbed some K-Y Jelly between my legs, neither of which he had done before. All pretence of gentleness had gone, and I knew this was it. I was rigid with fear and trembling from head to toe.
He put a hand over my mouth, forced my legs open and rammed himself hard against me. The pain was like a hot dagger. It felt as though his promise of ‘splitting me in half’ was finally happening. I screamed as loudly as I could beneath his big hand, and closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to look at his contorted face as he grunted above me. All I felt was searing pain, and a steady trail of tears running down into my ears.
It had taken him years to get to this point, and although I hated him with every fibre of my being, I also detested myself
for letting it happen. I felt dirty right through to the core of my being. I imagined that most girls would throw themselves from the top of a building rather than allowing their own father to rape them. I didn’t understand my own powerful instinct for survival–in fact, I felt betrayed by it. I was fifteen years and three months old and my life was a living nightmare. Something had been done that could never be undone. I wasn’t a virgin any more, and my virginity had been taken by my own dad.
Now I had been ‘broken in’, Dad became even more of a sex-crazed animal. Everything I had experienced up to this point had been like a walk in the park compared to the reality of my life now. He raped me at every possible opportunity, many times a day. On the days when I was going to school he would push me into the bathroom and enter me while Kat ate her toast in the kitchen. On one occasion I retched in the gutter on the way to school as I thought of what he had done to me only twenty minutes earlier. A well-spoken lady tutted as she walked past with her sausage dog: ‘That’s no way to lose weight,’ she said. It seemed a bizarre thing to say and I had no idea what she meant by it but humiliation burned my cheeks. I sat on a wall and let her get far enough in front of me that I wouldn’t have to pass her again.
From six to nine in the evening I would usually go cleaning with Mum, but Dad would always rape me when I came home, either in the front room or in his bedroom upstairs in front of the portable telly. But at least I wasn’t trapped under his legs all evening too.
Then a few months later things got worse for me. The company Mum cleaned for asked if she could sit on the front desk for a few hours every evening to let people in and out. The money was better than for her evening cleaning job, so she gave this up and for the first time in years I was free to stay at home. Unfortunately this meant Dad had even more opportunity to rape me, once Kat had gone to bed.
One evening, while Mum was still at work, Dad gave me some alcohol.
‘Get a bit of this down your neck,’ he said, filling a tumbler with Liebfraumilch. ‘It might loosen you up a bit.’
I hated the taste but drank it down in one or two gulps. I remembered the feeling my surreptitious swig of Babycham had given me on the final night of the school play, the way it made me float and not care about anything very much, and I hoped the glass of warm white wine Dad handed me would recreate that experience. I wanted to float away as far as I could from the horror I lived in every day. As I drank the wine I fought the urge to gag. It didn’t taste very nice, but the warmth it spread from the inside of my belly outwards was fairly instantaneous. I felt some of the long-held tension draining out of me, and my shoulders seemed to drop a couple of inches; I was forever bunching them up around my ears as if trying to use them to shield me from hurt.
Lately, Dad had been talking about love a lot. He did it now, pausing only to swallow alternate mouthfuls of gin and wine straight from the bottle.
‘I love you. I can’t help myself,’ he declared, before asking, ‘Do you love me?’
I knew that the love he talked about wasn’t the kind of love that normal fathers felt for their daughters. It was different to the kind he had spoken about when he told his brother a few years ago that he loved me like his own child and wanted to adopt me. Dad was trying to change the rules to make what he had done seem more acceptable. He was trying to paint himself as my boyfriend. But he had been my dad since I was a tiny girl of four, and even though he now raped me more frequently than he washed or brushed his teeth, that’s what he would always remain–my dad. I felt only disgust and revulsion for him.
His eyes watched me as I stared into my empty glass and braced myself for the slap or kick that was only ever a moment away.
‘Are you fucking deaf or something? I said, do you love me?’
The wine must have given me courage I had never previously possessed. I took my time to find the right words.
‘I love you as a dad,’ I muttered not quite brave enough to tell him that I hated him, tears springing to my eyes. ‘You’re meant to be my dad.’
It was like lighting a fuse.
‘You fucking little whore,’ he shouted, knocking glasses and bottles flying as he threw himself on top of me and began to slap and punch. ‘You like your dad’s big cock, don’t you?’
I found myself bent over the sofa face down, my nose painfully squashed into the cushions so the only way I could breathe was to open my mouth wide and try to suck warm air through the foam. He released me for a moment and I twisted
my head to the side. I felt him rip my knickers sideways, the cotton cutting into me, and then I heard the sound of him undoing his flies.
‘I’m going to ram this right up your tight little cunt,’ he said, ‘’cos that’s what you want, ain’t it?’
‘No, it’s not!’ I cried–whether out loud or in my head, I’m not sure.
‘You’re my fucking girlfriend now,’ he snarled, ‘not my daughter.’
During the course of this assault, he entered my anus. The sudden pain was overwhelming and I heard myself scream, and scream again.
Dad didn’t give me alcohol again until I was much older. He said I couldn’t handle it–but maybe it was him who couldn’t handle the courage it gave me.
A
couple of months short of my sixteenth birthday, Dad stopped me attending school for good. I didn’t even have a chance to sit my mock O’ Levels. Karen came to knock for me a few times and she couldn’t believe I wasn’t going to sit the exams.
‘But you’re so bright,’ she exclaimed. ‘How’re you going to get a good job without any qualifications?’
I shrugged, aware that Dad was listening to every word. The thought of a job, a life away from Dad, had never entered my mind as a real possibility. I had often dreamed of escaping, but knew that Dad would never let me go. He had told me he would kill me before he let that happen, and I believed him with every fibre of my being.
‘You’re mine,’ he’d say, ‘and if you ever try to walk out that door, I’ll find ya, fuck ya, and kill ya. Got it?’
Eventually Karen stopped knocking for me. It hurt me to think we’d never laugh together again, but I was skilled at putting painful thoughts into boxes and shutting them away in my mind where they couldn’t hurt me, and that’s what I did with Karen.
Now that I wasn’t attending school and was fast approaching my sixteenth birthday, when I’d be ‘legal’, Dad’s behaviour took a turn for the worse. He started drinking and gambling more than ever, and became more abusive on every level. He would openly touch me in front of Mum, pawing my breasts or bottom and making lewd comments. Despite all that he had done to me, and how defeated and powerless I felt, when he did these things, I always retained the ability to see that it was wrong. This way of living might have become my state of normality, but it was far from normal, and my face would burn in shame and embarrassment to reflect my feelings. Mum continued to turn a blind eye, just leaving the room if Dad started carrying on with me.