Handstands In The Dark: A True Story of Growing Up and Survival (6 page)

BOOK: Handstands In The Dark: A True Story of Growing Up and Survival
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I loved my Dad: he was the big father figure that we were supposed to be scared of but I never was – he was a pussycat to me. My Mammy used him as a threat to keep us kids in line, but he never carried out the punishments she promised he would give us.

Then, one day, my Dad told me he and I were going to play a game of hide and seek. I ran into the bathroom and locked the door tight. Dad called through the door:

‘Janey! Open the door – it’s your Dad! Unlock the door and let me in!’

I just sat there, frozen in fear, saying: ‘No, no. No!’

No amount of reassurance could get me to open the door. I sat there, crying, terrified. I sat tight.

‘What is it you’re afraid of, Janey?’ he asked. He was getting angry because he couldn’t understand why I would be scared of him. His voice was starting to have an edge: ‘Janey! It’s me – yer Dad! Open the door!’

He eventually had to borrow a ladder, come up the side of the house and climb in through the bathroom window. I sat staring at the floor as he tried patiently to coax me out of my terror. I was relieved when he just sat on the floor and held me for what seemed like hours. I was clinging to him like a life raft. Somewhere inside of me he felt my fear but could not rationalise it. I sat thinking:
I should have known my Dad would never hurt me
.

He only frightened me slightly when he was drunk, not because he was violent but because I was convinced he would fall over, bang his head on something sharp and die. In some of my nightmares, he fell and cracked his head open. In others, I was chased down dark streets by demons, I screamed as I ran with dead legs dragging me through invisible toffee that slowed me down; I would stop struggling, turn round, face the demons and shout: ‘I know this is a dream! I can wake up!’

Then one dark demon’s mouth would stop snarling and smile. The jaws would open and, slowly, it would taunt me: ‘Wake up, then!’

The conscious part of my brain struggles to awaken:

‘Please, please wake up, please wake up, please wake up!’

But nothing happens

I turn and face the dark demon.

It sniggers, reaches over and grabs me by the throat.

I can hardly breathe.

I can feel my life drain out of me.

Blood pulses behind my eyes.

I scream so loudly.

Eventually my own screams wake me up.

In my childhood, my nightmares never woke my parents. My sister Ann would waken, but not my parents. Major was my protector. Whenever Uncle David Percy came into our home, Major would attack him, snarling and biting, and get beaten for his aggression towards a close family member. He would be kicked under the kitchen table and I would crawl under with him, rubbing his kicked ribs and whispering, ‘Thanks, Major,’ into his black pointy Alsatian ears. He would look at me, blink and lick my face, then bury his head into my armpit and stay there for a while until his sore bits mended. For all the kickings he got, he never once gave up attacking David Percy. I would often sit with Major in my bedroom at home and plan a way to kill my Uncle but, of course, I knew it would not happen. Each time he demanded I obey him, I would comply in terror like a silent lamb to the slaughter. He would tell me I was a ‘bad girl’ and said I liked the things he did to me.

‘Say you like it.’

I would be forced to put my head down and tell him to ‘do it’ because I ‘liked it’. When I was being physically held down or punched or raped or suffering extreme pain inside my body I would try to shut off my mind or focus on a ripped piece of wallpaper or, in my mind’s eye, still try to believe I was standing in Disneyland watching all the colours of the bright parade and those flying Dumbo elephants I had seen on television.

* * *

My brother Vid knew nothing about the abuse, but, one day, he tried to sell me to a wee man with a lame leg who was caretaker of the local Catholic chapel and who told Vid that he would pay him £1 if he brought him girls. To my brother, a pound was a fortune. Vid had never shown much interest in me – I was too young and silly to be in his gang – but, later that same day, he started brushing my hair and wiping my face because, obviously, he did not want to deliver shabby goods on his first day of trading. My eagle-eyed Mammy spotted Vid in mid-brush and asked him why he was getting me all dressed up. He, in all innocence, told her:

‘The wee limpy man at St Barnabas told me he would give me a pound for a girl.’

This time, my Mammy saved me. Maybe she hated the thought of a Catholic touching me. Vid was promptly taken off to the local Police Office to tell them the tale of the paedophile who worked at the chapel. My brother sat in stony silence, frightened of the police but admitting nothing. They became more and more agitated at the whole sorry tale and eyed my Mammy as if she were lying. Annie, the queen of improvisation, grabbed the wire of the Anglepoise lamp, wrapped it around Vid’s wrist and told him:

‘This is a lie detector: every time you tell a lie you will get electrocuted!’

Vid took a deep breath and did not stop talking, his face ashen with fear. The wee limpy man was questioned but let go with only a warning.

Three weeks later, my Dad was standing in a queue at a bus stop, huddled against the driving snow, waiting to go to work, when someone with a walking stick shuffled by him. As he passed, my Dad recognised the caretaker and immediately bolted after him and punched and kicked him all over the street. The folk at the bus stop were horrified and tried to pull my Dad off him:

‘He’s a cripple! … What the fuck are you doing? … Get off him!’

Dad did not even bother to explain; he was too busy kicking and kicking and kicking the old man in the head and body. The police were called and Dad was charged, taken to court and fined. No one ever spoke about it again but, for years afterwards, every time my Dad saw the crippled caretaker he would beat him up. There were never witnesses; he was never charged again; and the chapel paedophile eventually left the area.

* * *

By the time I left primary school aged eleven and started secondary school, my Dad was no longer spending much time with us. My brother Vid was almost leaving secondary school and my sister Ann was working while my eldest brother Mij was 19 and getting into all sorts of bother. We all still lived at home, but it was at this point I felt the most alone. My sister and brothers were growing up very quickly and developing their own lives away from me; and my Uncle was still raping me regularly. For me, puberty had still not happened. I had no breasts; I still looked like a boy. I was also the smallest girl at my new school, Eastbank Academy. Other kids would stop and look at me then ask:

‘What age are ye? Ye’re awfie wee!’

All the pals I had were exceptionally tall for their age which only made me look even smaller. I tried hard to fit in, but it was difficult looking as I did – dressed like a burst jumble sale on skinny legs. The local second-hand shops were where my clothes came from – and some clothes were hand-me-downs from Mammy’s pals’ kids, which became most embarrassing when my own pals pointed out I was wearing their old jumpers.

* * *

My Uncle David Percy did not attack me weekly, nor were there specific patterns. At times it was frequent; at times I almost believed it had stopped altogether. He did not molest me every time he came to my home, only when the circumstances suited his needs. He liked to scare me and would sometimes threaten to kill my Dad or my sister Ann. To reinforce his threats, he once brought into my bedroom a black handgun with a brown wooden handle. He was holding me in a corner of the room; I was being subjected to his usual form of playtime and feeling desperate and I had a horrible terror in the pit of my stomach.
A gun means death
. The only time I had seen a gun was on television: if someone fired a gun, the other person was dead.
He’s going to kill me!
My Uncle had left it lying on the bed while he molested me and, when he got up to pull on his trousers, I grabbed the gun and held it with both hands like I’d seen in the police series
The Sweeney
on TV. I held it up high, pointing it at his face and stood up, gripping the trigger with my right index finger. His face went ashen and his breath started to quicken. I guessed he must be figuring out if the gun would fire, just as I was. I held it steady and he kept eye contact with me:

‘It has no bullets in it,’ he whispered. ‘But I can go get them and come back.’

I dropped my hand with the heavy metal in it, held out the gun to him and replied:

‘One day I will get you.’

It was the first time he actually had to acknowledge that I hated him.

I turned and walked out of the room. I felt for at least one second on that one day I had scared him. It was a small victory but I had not won the war.

5
The family

BY THE AGE
of twelve, I planned never to get married. I was going to go live in Australia and learn how to talk to Skippy the Bush Kangaroo so that I, too, could be the friend of TV’s talking marsupial. I was going to fly round the country in a hot-air balloon looking for other talking animals. I was going to hunt evil child-beating clowns (I knew they did exist) and burn them while the talking kangaroo shouted
Burn, you evil clown!

It was also when I was aged twelve that, one Friday night, my Dad disappeared. For a week, my Mammy phoned hospitals, the police and the steel factory, desperate to find him. After that week, he simply reappeared but never told her or us where he had been. It was clear, though, that he had finally given up the long struggle to keep his marriage together; he could not understand how he worked hard all week and we still could not afford to pay the electricity or rent. Other people seemed to manage, but not us. His salary would sometimes be ‘Wages Arrested’ (confiscated) by the sheriff’s officers and often we would be threatened with eviction. Dad moved out of our home. Maybe he just hung on until I was old enough; maybe he just could not cope with the cash problems; maybe he should have stayed and been a bigger man and sorted it all out. I don’t really know the reasons. But he went. He left but dutifully kept in touch every week. He came back and gave Mammy weekly cash to help out but, of course, it never really did help her. Nothing did.

She took the separation terribly; she saw the collapse of their marriage as a huge personal failure. But her fear of being without my Dad soon turned into anger. She would rant and rave to us about his shortcomings and then spend the rest of the night crying because she had been abandoned. She would turn on all of us at the slightest excuse. Some weeknights, when Mammy was either short of cash or – even worse – had run out of cigarettes, she would shout and bawl at us and run through the flat and slam doors and scream:

‘You’re all bastards!’

I would suffer badly if I had been to see Dad and did not return with cash. I was torn and confused and hated the whole situation. I wished everything could go back to the way it had been.

Mammy did have the good sense to go to Social Services and register as a lone parent which, in theory, worked out more financially viable as she was no longer responsible for the rent and upkeep of the family. She got State Support, but it did not amount to much and we did not notice any difference at all.

The strangest part was that, when it came to Saturday nights and Dad got drunk as normal, his homing instinct would often lead him staggering back to our flat. Mammy would put him on our old battered sofa and wait for him to pass out from the alcohol, then would gingerly go through his pockets and empty each one in turn. I would stand there rooted with fear in case he woke up and they started fighting. In the morning, when he regained consciousness, he would never refer to her stealing his money and, later on, I realised this was, in part, his way of giving an extra pay-off to Mammy. Neither had other partners that I knew of. To me, it seemed like having a Dad who worked away from home during the week.

Mammy was not good at disciplining the family on her own and the flat soon developed graffiti on the inside. My brother Mij and his friends used knives to carve names like JOE-D and CHAS TINNY on the wooden window frames and used pens to scrawl words on the walls. Mammy never cleaned them off or covered them up. Everything seemed not quite under control and our home began filling up with strangers who would sit with Mammy and take tablets and pills and drinks and would get freaked out of their heads and lie back on the floor and talk bollocks. Mammy had now started drinking alcohol. I hated all her stupid pals coming into our house with their even dafter boyfriends who just hung on because they knew eventually they’d get to fuck women who were full of tablets. None of them were bad people; it was just that we had enough problems of our own to be dealing with. I missed Dad so much it hurt. I felt abandoned. He had not just left her – he had left me. He knew how chaotic it was – that was why he’d left – but he’d left me, at twelve years old, to cope with it.

In Dad’s absence, my eldest brother Mij tried to fill his place as the big man of the house, but he was a mixture of spoilt first-born and petulant mummy’s boy. He had grown from a sensitive child into an insecure teenager and now, as a young man, he was vastly overweight and had become a big, violent bully. He would argue with Mammy and punch her; she would punch him; she would take her shoe off and hit him; he would chase her and punch her full-force in the head; and the two of them would roll about on the floor hitting each other. I had never seen Dad physically hit Mammy like this. It was terrifying. My other
brother
Vid and I would try to butt in and stop the violence but nothing on this earth could stop the two of them antagonising each other.

‘C’mon, then,’ Mammy would spit out at Mij. ‘Hit me – go on – hit me!’

‘I will!’ he’d say. ‘If you don’t shut up, I’ll hit ye!’

‘Go fuckin’ on –
hit
yer own Mammy! Does everybody
know
ye hit yer
mammy
, ye big fat
bastard
!’

Mij would hit Mammy so hard she would be bruised; she would fight back so fiercely he would be scratched all over his face. My sister Ann would mostly avoid it all but, when Mij got too close, she would lash out at him too; she would fight back as hard as my Mammy and took no prisoners. When the fighting got very violent, my dog Major would join in and one or more of the brawling humans would get bitten. I was never sure if the fighting scared Major or excited him or if he was just hungry. The house was like an asylum; it would never have happened if my Dad had been there but, of course, Dad was told nothing about it because Mammy loved Mij dearly and would always protect him. At times, I wondered if Mammy did it just to get attention. If everything was quiet, she would create a drama. But, if Mij gave her a black eye or a cut arm or a badly bruised leg, she’d say: ‘Aye, but he’s ma son! I love ma son!’ and then she would cry and so would he.

BOOK: Handstands In The Dark: A True Story of Growing Up and Survival
10.45Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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