I Remember, Daddy (11 page)

Everything came to a head one day when we had a test. I’d revised for it until I was answering questions in my sleep, and a few days later, when the teacher handed out our marked papers in class, mine was on the top of the pile.

I couldn’t believe that I’d got the best mark. I stared at the number that was written in red ink at the top of the page: 94%! I could feel my cheeks burning red with pride and a sense of satisfaction at the thought that all my hard work had been worthwhile. Perhaps I wasn’t stupid after all; maybe if I did work hard, I could do as well as the other girls, or even better.

The geography teacher used to give little presents to girls who got good scores in tests. On that day, however, she just handed my paper to me without a word and then turned to praise the girl who’d come second. I looked down quickly at my desk to hide the tears of disappointed embarrassment that had sprung into my eyes, and when I looked up again, one of my friends had raised her hand.

The teacher looked in her direction and arched her eyebrows quizzically.

‘Did Katie Matthews get the top mark, Miss?’ my friend asked.

‘Yes. She did.’ The teacher almost snapped her reply. Then, turning to hand a paper to another girl, she added over her shoulder to my friend, ‘It’s a shame your own mark wasn’t as good.’

‘But … If Katie got the best mark, why didn’t you say anything to her, Miss?’ my friend persisted. ‘You always say something to the girl who comes first. So why not …’

The teacher interrupted her, her face flushed with irritation. ‘That’s enough, thank you. I don’t need …’

It was my turn to interrupt. I scraped my chair noisily across the floor, pushing it away from my desk as I stood up and shouted, ‘I’ve had enough of you. You can just fuck off.’

For a split-second the teacher was too shocked to respond. Then she threw the pile of remaining papers down on the desk in front of her, raised one arm, pointed with her index finger towards the door and bellowed, ‘Out! Get out of my classroom Katherine Matthews.’

‘Don’t worry, I’m going,’ I shouted back at her, grabbing the bag that was hanging over the back of my chair and sweeping everything off my desk into it with one angry movement of my arm. ‘I’m going to the headmistress, and I’m going to tell her about you. And I’m not coming back to your stupid geography classes ever again. You can stuff them.’

I stormed out of the classroom and marched down the corridor to the headmistress’s study, where I knocked on the door.

The headmistress regarded me steadily as I told her what had happened. Then she shook her head and said with a sigh, ‘What am I going to do with you, Katie? You know what this means, don’t you.’

‘I suppose I’m going to get expelled again,’ I answered, sighing deeply myself at the thought of all the shouting and arguing I would have to endure when my father and mother found out what had happened.

To my surprise, however, the headmistress almost smiled as she said, ‘No. I’m not going to expel you – again – although I know that’s what you’d like me to do. You won’t, of course, be able to return to any geography lessons. So, instead, you can do extra maths and French.’

Starting with my father when I was a very small child, everyone always seemed to be telling me that I’d never get anywhere in my life. My headmistress didn’t seem to agree with them, but some of my teachers voiced the opinion that it was hardly worth my taking my ‘O’ levels. And one day I suddenly got sick of all their negative opinions of me and thought, ‘Just you watch me,’ and I settled down to catch up on all the work I’d missed, ending up taking five exams and passing all of them – four with A grades.

Despite my unexpected academic success, however, I still hated school. I hated having to follow rules that seemed pointless and without any real purpose other than to make us do whatever we were told. I’d spent my whole life doing what I was told, and now there was something inside me that was rebelling and questioning everything, something that prevented me ever being able to relax and just go with the flow. It was a tension, a type of latent aggression, that seemed to make me constantly dissatisfied, and I didn’t understand why. What I did know, though, was that I couldn’t bear to stay on at school a moment longer after I’d taken my exams. So, just before my 16th birthday, I persuaded my mother to persuade the school to let me leave, and I started working full-time at the shop where I’d had a Saturday job for the last couple of years.

The following year, when I was 17, my brother moved in to live with my mother and me for a while. We’d spent so little time together over the years that I felt as though I barely knew my brother, and it was clear that he felt the same disconnect with me. We fought almost constantly, until one day my mother told me, ‘I can’t cope with your behaviour any more. You’re going to have to go and stay with your father.’

Although he’d stopped sexually abusing me some five years earlier, I was still afraid of my father. But by that time I didn’t care what happened to me or where I was sent to live, so I moved into his house and stayed there for a few months.

Sally had just left him. As well as being feisty, she was a realist, and whereas I just pretended to be tough, she really was as hard as nails. She wasn’t a woman who would ever have allowed herself to be bullied and coerced by anyone and, despite myself, I always rather liked her, particularly when I discovered that she’d taken literally everything with her when she’d gone, including every single light bulb in the house.

In contrast to my mother, who used to cower and whimper whenever my father attacked her, Sally would attack him right back again, hitting him over the head with a pan or whatever came to hand whenever he had a go at her. I admired her for that, and I often wondered why my father – who would, quite literally, turn puce with rage if any of us every argued with him – put up with it. I suppose the answer was that he was a bully and, as with all bullies, all it needed was for someone to stand up to him.

Sally and my father came from the same sort of background and they understood each other. When he married my mother, my father had a game plan – to be rich and successful and to ‘move up in the world’ – and I think he hated the fact that my mother belonged naturally to the world he aspired to be part of. So, to correct the balance and assert a superiority he maybe didn’t entirely feel, he intimidated and abused her. And she didn’t fight back, because she was already timid and unsure of herself when they met, and because, for whatever reason, she loved him.

My father had controlled and brainwashed me into obeying him from a very early age and, like my mother, I accepted the reflection of myself that I saw in his eyes – in my case, because I knew no differently. But Sally had a mind of her own; she could be as harsh and determined as my father was, and he knew that she wouldn’t be afraid to use any information she had against him – and against his friends – if he pushed her too far. So, when their marriage broke up, instead of charging her rent to live in a dismal flat in one of the worst parts of town, as he’d done to my mother, he bought her a house and a small business, and they remained friends.

However, my father wasn’t a man to be without a woman for long, and after Sally left he soon turned his attentions to Gillian, who was not much older than I was. For a long time, he persisted in pretending she was ‘just helping me with some work I’m doing’, which was a lie that was both embarrassing and totally unnecessary, because the true nature of their relationship was clear to everyone.

One night, my father took Gillian and me out for dinner, and we were having a drink in a pub afterwards when a man came in and greeted him effusively. My father introduced him to Gillian as Bradley, a friend of his who owned a popular nightclub in town. I’d heard my father talk about him before, and I knew that he’d been arrested for something – I couldn’t remember what – but that, because he had friends in influential circles, he’d gone to court but not to prison.

‘And who’s this?’ the man asked, sitting down next to me and leaning a bit too close towards me.

‘This is my daughter, er … Katie,’ my father told him, pretending – or perhaps not – that he’d had to think for a moment to remember my name.

‘She’s very pretty.’ Bradley smiled a lewd smile that showed a row of uneven, yellow teeth. He looked like something out of a low-budget porn film – fat and ugly, with long, curly, dirty-blond hair and a very unattractive moustache.

‘You can have her for a tenner,’ my father told him, leaning forward in his chair to take a swig from his glass of whisky and smirking at me.

‘Pardon?’ I asked my father.

I could feel the heat of humiliation burning my cheeks. But he ignored me and spoke again to his friend. ‘I said you can have her for a tenner, Bradley. If you want her, take her.’

I’d thought at first that he was making a tasteless joke, but there was no hint of humour in his voice, and I realised with a sick feeling that he was completely serious. He was actually offering his own 17-year-old daughter to a sleazy, criminal nightclub owner.

I was furious. When I was young, my father used to tell me that the only ‘useful’ thing women were capable of doing was spreading their legs, and it was clearly an opinion he still held.

‘You’re unbelievable,’ I told him, pushing back my chair and standing up.

I looked down at him coldly for a moment and then walked away from him towards the door. Gillian followed me out of the pub, and a few seconds later my father came out too, laughing and joking with someone who’d held the door open for him.

As soon as the car was moving, Gillian asked my father, ‘How could you do that? That was horrible. It was so embarrassing for Katie.’ Then she burst into tears.

My father didn’t answer her, but I could sense his anger as we drove back to his house in silence.

I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing how upset I was, so I went straight to the bathroom, and as I came out again I could hear him shouting at Gillian, ‘Don’t ever question anything I do. And don’t ever cry in front of my daughter again!’

I felt sorry for her. What my father had said in the pub had infuriated and hurt me, but it hadn’t shocked me. It was just the way he was, and there was nothing anyone was ever going to be able to do to change him. Clearly, though, it had shocked Gillian, and I knew she’d just learned her first lesson about what would happen if she questioned or argued with my father.

I knew I couldn’t live at his house any longer after that. I left a few days later and moved in to the first of a series of rooms in other people’s flats that I rented over the next few months.

A
few months later, when I was 18, I spent the summer working in a seaside town with my friend Jenny. We rented a couple of rooms in a house that was owned and lived in by a man and his son, although they were hardly ever there and we often had the place to ourselves for days at a time. It all seemed like an adventure. The town was popular with holiday-makers, so there were plenty of jobs to be had during the summer, and we both started work almost immediately after we arrived – Jenny in a café/restaurant and me in a pub. Then we settled down to earn some money and enjoy the sun, sea and sense of freedom we both felt at being footloose, fancy-free and far away from home.

There were lots of other young people working the summer season, and we soon made friends. Because there was no one there who knew me – apart from Jenny, who I could trust not to talk about me to anyone – I felt as though, for the first time in my life, I could decide who I was and what I wanted to tell people about myself. Although I could never completely lose my sense of underlying guilt and anxiety, it was liberating to get away from my real life for a while and from all the baggage and complications that went with it.

One of the people I became friends with was a girl called Issie. She was seven months’ pregnant when I met her, and her boyfriend, Dan, was the manager of the pub where I was working. Issie was a really lovely girl, sweet-natured and pretty and clearly besotted by Dan, who seemed to be just as in love with her, too. So, on the couple of occasions when Dan tried to kiss me, I brushed it off, told him not to be so daft and assumed he was just messing around.

Then, one night, when I finished work late, after everyone else had already left the pub, Dan offered to walk me home. He was locking up as I was leaving and so we set off together, past the few drunks who were still out on the streets and along the road that led to the house where I was staying. We talked about some of the people who’d been in the pub that night, and about the preparations he and Issie were making for the birth of their baby, and when we got to the house, he asked if he could come in to phone for a taxi to take him the rest of the way home.

As I turned my key in the front door, the house was in darkness. The owner and his son were away, and clearly Jenny was having a late night out too. So I turned on the hall light, showed Dan where the phone was and then went upstairs to the bathroom.

When I came out, Dan was standing outside the bathroom door and I almost jumped out of my skin.

‘God, you gave me a fright, lurking there in the darkness,’ I told him. ‘Did you get a taxi okay? Come on, I’ll make some coffee while we’re waiting.’

I waited for him to turn and walk back down the stairs ahead of me. But he just stood there and asked, ‘Which is your room?’

‘It’s down there,’ I said, pointing vaguely down the landing. ‘It’s a nice house, isn’t it? We were lucky to find it. Come on. I’ll put the kettle on.’

Suddenly, Dan lunged at me, grabbed me by the shoulders and tried to kiss me.

‘Jesus, Dan,’ I said, twisting my head from side to side as I tried to shake him off. ‘Cut it out! What the hell are you doing?’

‘Come on, Katie. You know you want it.’ There was a nasty edge to his voice that I’d never heard before.

‘Of course I don’t bloody want it.’ I began to feel sick. ‘Issie’s my friend, and she’s your girlfriend and about to become the mother of your child. Forget it, Dan. Let’s just make some coffee.’

I tried to push him away, but he grasped my arms, digging his fingers painfully into my skin as he half-carried, half-dragged me along the landing and kicked open my bedroom door. I struggled wildly, trying to elbow him in the stomach, but it was as though he couldn’t even feel it.

‘For Christ’s sake!’ I shouted at him. But he just threw me on to the bed, and when I saw the cruel, sneering expression on his face and the blank emptiness in his eyes, I began to feel really afraid.

As he flung himself down on top of me, I tried to twist my body underneath his so that I could raise my knee and kick him. But I couldn’t move.

‘Stop it. Please. I don’t want this.’ For a moment I could hear my mother’s voice pleading with my father. A single sob rose up from somewhere deep inside me, and it was as though I could feel the same sense of hopelessness and humiliation she must have felt so many times while they were married.

Dan pinned me to the bed with his knees, pulled up my skirt and ripped off my underwear. And then he raped me, while I lay underneath him, crying like a child. For a split-second I thought I saw my father’s face looking down at me and heard his voice saying, ‘This is your fault: bad things only happen to bad people.’

When Dan had finished, he stood up, pulled on his underpants and jeans and walked out of the room without a word. I turned towards the wall and pulled the sheet up over me, pressing my face into the pillow, too numb and exhausted even to cry any more.

Although I didn’t hear the front door shut, I assumed that Dan had left the house, until, a few seconds later, I heard a sound and turned my head to see him standing in the doorway of my bedroom. He was holding a wooden-handled floor brush and he smiled a cold, scornful smile as he snatched the sheet that was covering me and threw it on to the floor. Then he held me down on the bed as he forced the handle of the brush inside me. It felt as though fire was shooting up through my body, and I screamed as I tried to twist away from him.

I must have blacked out, because the next thing I remember is hearing the front door slam and opening my eyes to find myself alone in my bedroom. I dropped one arm over the side of the bed, dragged the sheet across my shivering body and began to sob.

I don’t know how long I’d been lying there, unaware of everything except for the intense pain that seemed to be burning inside me, when I heard a noise downstairs. I held my breath to listen. There was definitely someone in the house; Dan hadn’t gone after all. I started to whimper like a cowed, frightened dog and had to bite my lip to stop myself crying out as panic surged through my body. I pulled the sheet over my head, the way I used to do when I was a child, and began to pray, ‘Please, God, don’t let him see me.’

But it was Jenny, not Dan, who opened my bedroom door and whispered, ‘Katie, are you awake?’

I lowered the sheet and turned slowly to look at her, and she gasped.

‘God, Katie, what’s up?’ she asked, sitting down on the edge of my bed and gently touching my tear-stained face. ‘Are you ill?’

‘I … I’ve got a terrible pain,’ I told her. ‘In my stomach.’

‘You look awful,’ she said. ‘How long have you been like this? I’m going to call an ambulance.’

‘No!’ I tried to sit up, but it felt as though someone had removed every single bone in my body, and I flopped back again on to the pillow. ‘No, I don’t need an ambulance. I just want …’ I breathed in sharply as a great wave of pain washed over me.

‘I’m sorry.’ Jenny stood up. ‘I really do think you need to go to hospital. You might have appendicitis.’

Before I could protest again, she’d left the room and I could hear her talking on the telephone in the hallway.

With Jenny’s help, I managed to walk to the bathroom, where I washed away the blood from between my legs. Then we sat together in the living room, waiting for the ambulance to arrive.

I said nothing to anyone about what had happened, and for the next few days I was kept in hospital while they did tests, and then scratched their heads in bafflement at what could possibly be causing such acute and clearly agonising pain. Having ruled out appendicitis, it was decided that I must have a urinary tract infection. So they gave me antibiotics as well as painkillers. And still I said nothing, because I was filled with a sense of shame and guilt that I didn’t understand, but that was so overwhelming it made me wish I could just curl up and die.

The day after I’d been admitted to the hospital, one of Dan’s friends came to see me. I’d seen him in the pub a couple of times, but I didn’t know him very well, and as he was an unlikely and unexpected visitor, I didn’t immediately recognise him when I saw him walking down the ward. So I was surprised when he stopped by my bed and said, ‘How ya doing?’

‘Are you here to see me?’ I asked him.

He nodded.

‘Why? Why have you come?’ But, before he had time to answer, I added, ‘It doesn’t matter. I don’t want to talk to you anyway. Please, just leave me alone.’

‘It’s okay,’ he told me. ‘I’ve just come to see how you’re doing – and to bring you this.’ He held out towards me what looked like a bit of rolled-up paper and winked.

‘Take it,’ he said, shaking it briefly under my nose and then trying to thrust it into my hand. ‘It’ll calm you down.’

Suddenly I realised it was a joint.

‘I’m in a hospital for God’s sake!’ I hissed, turning my head away from his outstretched hand and glancing nervously around the ward, anxious in case anyone else could see what he was holding. ‘I don’t want it. I don’t smoke that stuff anyway.’

‘Yeah, but this is a special occasion,’ he grinned. ‘People use it as medicine when they’re not well. It’ll do you good.’

I clenched my fists and looked away from him, and eventually he shrugged and slipped the joint into the pocket of his jacket.

‘Have you told anyone about what happened?’ he asked, walking over to the window beside my bed and leaning forward slightly so that he could look down into the street below.

I didn’t answer.

‘I’m guessing you haven’t,’ he continued after a moment. ‘And I just wanted to tell you that you’re doing the right thing. Dan’s been in trouble before, see. So he could go to prison if you start blabbing. And then poor old Issie’s baby wouldn’t have a father. I know Issie’s your friend, and you wouldn’t want to do that to her. Would you? Besides, what happened was your fault really. All those short skirts you girls wear.’ He turned away from the window and leered. ‘You’re just asking for it.’

His tone was chattily matter-of-fact. Perhaps he was too stoned to be aggressive, or perhaps he was so sure I’d agree with his point of view and accept responsibility for what his friend had done to me that there was no need for him even to raise his voice. He didn’t have to worry, though. I already felt guilty and tainted by what Dan had done. I just wanted to block it out of my mind and pretend it had never happened. And I certainly didn’t want to talk to anyone about it, not even my best friend Jenny.

A few days later, when I was discharged from the hospital, I went back to the house, packed up my things and got a train home. I’d already spoken on the phone to my mother, so she knew I’d been in hospital, although she didn’t know why. She must have been concerned about how low and depressed I sounded, though, because apparently as soon as I’d rung off she phoned my father. It was one of the periods when they were talking to each other, and she told him how worried she was about me and asked if there was any chance that he could pay for me to have a holiday.

‘Perfect timing!’ my father told her cheerfully. ‘I’ve rented a place for the week, for the Test match. She can come with me.’

A few days later, I travelled with Gillian – who, for some reason, my father was still pretending was just his ‘researcher’ – to stay at the large house he’d rented in the countryside near the city where the Test match was going to take place. The plan was that Gillian and I would be there on our own for a couple of days and then he’d drive down at the weekend.

I quite liked Gillian, and we had a pleasant, fairly relaxed couple of days together. Then, on the day my father was due to arrive, it was an hour or two before we were expecting him and I was smoking in the living room when I heard a car pull up on the gravel drive. Gillian immediately flew into a panic.

‘Oh my God! What are we going to do?’ she screeched, wafting her hand backwards and forwards in front of my cigarette. ‘That’s your dad! He hates people smoking. Quick, put the cigarette out. Oh my God!’

Clearly, my father’s relationship with Gillian was more similar to the one he’d had with my mother than with Sally.

Although I’d vowed to myself that I would no longer allow my father to unnerve and undermine me, I couldn’t help catching Gillian’s sense of hysteria. I stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray on the coffee table and then pushed it under the sofa, while Gillian continued to wave her arms around like someone sending crazy semaphore messages.

As it turned out, though, she was right to be afraid, because as soon as my father walked into the house, he stopped, tilted his head back slightly, sniffed a couple of times and said, ‘Who’s been smoking?’

Gillian and I were almost quaking with fear, but I managed to find my tongue first.

‘Oh, it was the handyman,’ I told my father, trying to sound casual but disapproving. ‘He had one in his hand when he came in to fix something or other.’

‘Well, tell him not to smoke in the house again,’ my father snapped, and I felt Gillian slowly releasing the breath she’d been holding.

The house was beautiful, and massive, and I wondered why my father had rented somewhere with so many rooms for just the three of us. Then, later that same day, the doorbell rang, heralding the arrival of the first of all the friends he’d invited to stay – several of them men I’d known as a child.

I felt stupid and embarrassed for having believed that my father had been concerned for my well-being and that he’d wanted to give me a holiday. Because it soon became clear that I wasn’t there for a holiday at all; I was there to help Gillian in her role as chief cook and bottle-washer. Almost every day for the rest of the week, she and I bought food, prepared vegetables and cooked for all my father’s guests. And when we weren’t stuck in the kitchen, cooking and washing up, he expected us always to be at his beck and call.

My common sense told me to shrug it off and just do it, because I shouldn’t have expected anything better from my father and, actually, it didn’t matter anyway. But I couldn’t help feeling hurt and disappointed because, despite years of experience that should have told me otherwise, I’d allowed myself to think that he might finally have decided he liked me enough to want to spend some time with me.