Around this time, she began to lose a bit of weight and take more pride in her appearance. One day she came home from a trip down the market, wheeling her pull-along shopping trolley behind her. In amongst the King Edward potatoes and cans of Special Brew lay a small plastic bag. She pulled it out and placed it in the middle of the kitchen table.
‘’Ere, look at these, Frank,’ she said, pulling out a tangle of what looked like black, red and pink netting. ‘Got myself some new drawers. What do you think?’ She held the flimsy black knickers with red and pink bows against her groin and waited for Dad to comment.
He grunted from behind his copy of
The Sun
, and continued to pick his teeth with a broken matchstick, totally ignoring her.
‘That’s fucking charming, that is,’ she said, stuffing them back into the bag, and flashing me an angry look as she did so.
It was as if she blamed me for all that Dad had done, and the way he treated her. She thought I had stolen her man from her.
In that moment, I realised how much their relationship had changed. Years ago, she wouldn’t have dared to buy herself new underwear, or any other clothes, without Dad’s permission. If she had, he would have convinced himself she was having an affair and given her a right-hander, or worse. It was as if he had transferred all that obsessive jealousy onto me. Now Mum was free, to a large extent, and it was me who had to account for my every waking moment, every new item of clothing or bottle of deodorant.
‘Men can’t help acting on Impulse, eh? What the fuck you buying that shit for, you slag.’
At night when I lay in bed, I’d do my best to block out the sound of Mum and Dad having sex. He was insatiable and still wanted his conjugal rights with her despite the three or four times he’d have raped me earlier in the day. Every inch of my body hurt. Only an hour or two before, I was lying in Mum’s bed exactly where she was lying now, while Dad pounded into me. When he was finished, he would press the sticky condom into my hand and I’d have to go and flush it down the toilet.
Once Mum went in after me and I heard her shout, ‘I wish people would flush the fucking toilet properly in this house.’ She must have seen the condom floating on top of the water.
Dad was drinking and gambling heavily every day. There was no escape for me. I was trapped with him all day, every day. I wasn’t allowed out on my own, except to run round the
corner if Mum or Dad needed something from the shop. I mean run, literally. Dad would time me, and if there was a particularly long queue I’d start to panic. When I got home red-faced and breathless from the run, Dad would be convinced I had been having sex with someone. He’d shout and rant and rage, and take me upstairs to the front room where he’d thrust his fingers between my legs and sniff them.
‘I can smell spunk, you cunt.’
‘No, Dad,’ I’d say, cowering in the corner. ‘I haven’t done anything. Please, don’t.’
One day Dad read a letter on the problem page in
The Sun
. It was about a woman who was fed up with her husband wanting sex several times a day.
‘Who’s been writing letters about me?’ he laughed, looking from me to Mum. There was an awkward silence during which Mum and I carefully avoided each other’s eyes.
‘Joke,’ said Dad, turning to the sports pages to study the horseracing form.
Later, when they weren’t looking, I read the letter myself. The man was just like Dad, with an insatiable sexual appetite, and the wife couldn’t stand it any more and had started to hope he would have an affair. The agony aunt was of the mind that open relationships were something of a rocky road, and she suggested marriage guidance, as I noticed she did with all the other problems on the page.
I thought about what an ‘open’ relationship was, and it struck me that Mum and Dad, who were still the best of friends in their own way, had created their own format. Mum
allowed Dad to do things to me, as long as he didn’t go elsewhere. It would take more than marriage guidance to fix what was wrong with them.
I wondered if Mum was glad Dad only did it to her at night in bed these days? I imagined she must have felt relieved that she didn’t have to put up with him wanting sex throughout the day like he used to when they first met, because he had me now. Sometimes he’d wait until Mum was out of the house before bending me over the stairs or the sofa, but other times he’d do it while she was pottering about downstairs. He didn’t use condoms on these occasions, which he referred to as ‘a quick bunk-up’. There wasn’t enough time, so he would simply withdraw at the last moment and leave me to clean up the mess. He was so rough that I often found it painful to sit down afterwards, and suffered increasingly severe bouts of cystitis.
Now that I was a little older, Dad became much more violent. He was still careful not to mark my face, although occasionally he’d make a mistake and I’d be left with a bruise or a bright red hand mark across my cheek. But mostly it was the rest of my body that bore the marks of his increasingly sadistic tendencies.
I’d only have to look at him the wrong way, or use margarine instead of butter on his toast, and he’d be off, pinching and biting my breasts and buttocks. Later I’d look in the mirror and watch the oval teeth-shaped bruises appearing. Over the coming week they’d change colour running through purple, blue, green and yellow, only to be replaced by new ones as soon as they disappeared. Just as one part of me healed,
there would be another tender spot to take its place. Now that my pubic hair was growing, he decided there was no better entertainment than dragging me around by it. Once or twice after a loss on the horses, he burnt me with his cigarette, grinding it painfully into my hand. But more often than not, he’d simply smoke his cigarette and instead of putting it out in the ashtray, he’d flick it at me, so I’d have to dodge it or quickly shut my eyes. Then I’d have to find where it had landed before it caused a fire. He’d do this a lot when he’d been drinking, seeming to find it hilarious. If Mum saw, she would just chide him like a naughty child, saying, ‘Now, now, Frank, it’s time you had a lay down before we go up in bleed-in’ flames.’
One night, shortly after my sixteenth birthday, I overheard a momentous conversation that confirmed one of my worst fears. It must have been around one in the morning and I had been tossing and turning in my bed for at least a couple of hours. My back was grazed where Dad had kicked me earlier that evening, and it hurt no matter what position I tried to lie in. I needed to use the loo but I was frightened I might bump into him again. Usually I could hear him either snoring or having sex with Mum in their bedroom at night, so I was worried he might still be up and roaming around downstairs. But I was desperate, so I decided to take my chances anyway. As I crept down the stairs towards the loo on the first floor, I heard Mum and Dad talking downstairs in the kitchen.
Ordinarily I wouldn’t hang about to listen, but something made me stop and what I heard sent a chill down my spine.
They were talking in casual tones, as if discussing nothing more significant than the weather.
‘But you were meant to be her father, not her lover,’ said Mum, reasonably.
‘I know, but I’ve told you I can’t help it,’ Dad explained. ‘For ages now I’ve thought of her more as me girlfriend than a daughter. You knew that.’
‘You promised you’d stop doing it,’ said Mum. ‘No other woman would have put up with this for so long.’
I wanted to pass out and throw up all at once. How long had Mum known for sure? They were discussing the situation as if it was an old subject they were revisiting for the hundredth time. There was no shock, anger or surprise on Mum’s part. It was final confirmation to me that she had known, if not all along, then for a very long time indeed. How could she let him do this to me, her daughter? How could she tolerate him touching her, knowing what he had done to me?
I had so many questions, I felt dizzy. I crept into the bathroom and stood there in the dark spitting bile into the toilet bowl. My heart pounded as I realised Mum had betrayed me in the worst possible way. She had seen me beaten black and blue, prevented from living a normal life like any other teenage girl. How could she do this to me? The feelings of guilt and shame, of being tainted and dirty, weighed heavily upon me. I knew I hadn’t wanted any of what had happened to me, had felt powerless to stop it, but I couldn’t help feeling that if Mum wasn’t angry with Dad, if she wasn’t running screaming to the police or hitting him over the head with a frying pan, then she must be angry with me instead. And I
couldn’t work out how you could be angry with your own child in such a situation. Had she convinced herself I was a willing participant? I thought back over all the times she had been cold and distant, shooting me hard stares, and I felt terrified. I literally didn’t have a friend in the world.
As I lay in bed that night, listening to the usual grunts and groans coming from the bedroom next door, I cried until eventually I drifted off into a merciful sleep. The next morning my heart still hurt, but I made up my mind that I was going to bring it all out in the open with Mum when she came home from work. I was filled with fresh hope that the nightmare would finally come to an end then. Surely she would have to send me off to stay with Diane or Jenny? Once I’d told her that Dad forced me to have sex with him and I hated it, she couldn’t let it continue, surely? I knew that this day would mark a turning point, and somehow I hoped that by the end of it I’d have a whole new direction, a new life. The thought of what Dad might do left me petrified, but between the two of us, me and Mum, we could deal with him. Dad had never let us have a phone installed–he preferred us to be totally cut off from the outside world–but if we both screamed loud enough, maybe the neighbours would ring the police.
I stood at the sink and did the washing-up from the night before. I hoped Mum still had that piece of paper with Diane’s address on it. If I went there, I could finally meet my little niece or nephew. Or maybe she might be able to remember where Jenny lived in Kent. It would be hard to look my family in the face after all Dad had done to me, but I knew they’d understand that it wasn’t my choice. They might even be
annoyed with Mum for letting it go on so long. I realised it would take a lot of courage for Mum to face them after everything that had happened, and it was then that all my little dreams of freedom began to waver. If Mum had known for some time, why hadn’t she tried to help me before? What would be different now? I began to feel overwhelmed with confusing feelings. I just wanted to be a normal teenager, like Joanie out of
Happy Days
. Was that too much to ask?
By the time Dad slammed into the kitchen and bent down over the stove to light his morning cigarette, my eyes were streaming with tears and my shoulders were heaving.
‘What’s up with you?’ asked Dad, his usual self.
I had planned on being so sensible and grown-up. I had turned sixteen but I felt as if I were six years old again. It was all too much to handle and I could find neither the words nor the courage to express the way I felt.
‘She knows, doesn’t she?’ I wailed, my voice rising in despair. All the emotion I’d suppressed for years was struggling to get out.
Dad looked almost embarrassed. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘So what?’
I ran up to my bedroom and sat with my back to the door, my feet braced against the bed in case Dad came storming up the stairs as he normally would. It wasn’t until a good half an hour had passed that I felt safe enough to move. It seemed things were changing; he hadn’t followed and kicked me round the room for a start. I sat on the edge of my bed and waited for Mum to come home. I tried to rehearse what I would say, but I didn’t know where to start. I didn’t want to
dwell on the fact that she had known and had chosen not to help me. The last thing I wanted was for her to feel bad, because then she would get angry and I needed her now more than ever. She had to get me away from here.
I stared at my clock and watched as each agonising minute ticked by. Periodically I’d look out of the window but I had to sit down again quickly because when I stood up my tummy would do nervous somersaults. I wished I could smoke like Mum did when she was anxious, because it seemed to settle her nerves. I thought about how bizarre it was that I was routinely raped and battered by my dad with my mum’s full knowledge and yet both of them had always frowned upon the idea of me taking up smoking. I was just a kid, too young to smoke and swear. Dad always told me that he wanted me to hang on to my innocence for as long as possible.
By the time I heard the gate swing outside and Mum’s key turning in the lock, I had worked myself up into another state. My eyes would barely open they were so swollen with tears, and my head was throbbing with pain due to the hours of crying. My whole body was trembling. I was absolutely terrified. Terrified of Mum and what we would both feel when we locked eyes for the first time now that the family’s biggest open secret was no longer under wraps. I was terrified of Dad and what damage he would inflict and on whom: Mum and me, or just me, as it had been for the last few years?
I opened the bedroom door and heard them talking downstairs. Dad was saying ‘She knows that you know. She heard us talking last night.’
There was more talk in hushed tones, then Mum started coming up the stairs.
When she reached the top flight, she gave a huge, theatrical sigh and exclaimed, ‘Oh my Gawd!’ as if it were all a big joke. She sounded as though she was doing an impression of Frankie Howerd or one of the
Carry On
team. Surely it was all an act though? She couldn’t possibly be dealing with this whole thing in such a light-hearted manner.
I ran back into my bedroom, dreading the moment she’d walk into the room. I was excruciatingly embarrassed and ashamed, as if it was all my fault and I wasn’t just a victim of my own dad’s perversions. I knew I wasn’t thinking rationally. I couldn’t, I was so torn up with fear on so many different levels.
As she came through the door, I became almost hysterical. I rushed towards her and threw myself into her arms, my whole body shaking with sobs. As I felt her arms hold me to her for the first time in years, it was as if a dam burst within me. All the grief for my lost family, my childhood, my schooling and my teenage years came flooding out.