Mummy Knew (13 page)

All I could do was try to keep away from Dad as much as possible, but it was very difficult because he became obsessed with knowing my every movement. He always wanted me near him. If I asked if I could go out with a friend from school, Dad made it clear that he would class it as an act of betrayal. He only had to spit in my cornflakes or call me a name like stupid prat, little piss-arsed fucker, ugly cunt or fat bitch, and I’d decide I didn’t want to go out after all.

Mum was no comfort whatsoever. Her favourite expression was ‘She’s not boo-hooing again, is she? Does it ever stop?’

Dad wanted to control every aspect of my life: where I went, what I did, where I sat, yet because of his violent mood swings, I was still disproportionately grateful whenever he was nice to me. I tried hard not to do anything wrong as I lived in fear of his mood changing. He demanded that I spend every spare minute with him and this habit was well entrenched by now. The only respite I ever got was during the day at school, or if I volunteered to go cleaning with Mum. That’s why, from the age of eleven and a half, I made sure I
was doing a lot more cleaning. I knew she wouldn’t take my side against Dad, but if I stayed close to her he wouldn’t be able to do anything, would he?

T
he contacts Mum and Dad had made while cleaning for media companies in the West End had led to them securing the cleaning contract for a large new office building in Kensington, which had apparently cost millions to renovate. It was a mass of marble, smoked glass, chrome and shag-pile carpets. Every morning at 3.30am the alarm would go off and Mum would drag herself out of bed and get ready to catch the bus. If Dad was sober enough he would go with her, mainly to supervise the cash-in-hand cleaners they employed on a casual basis. Dad would come home at 8.30am, by which time I would have fed and dressed Kat and be ready to walk her to nursery. Mum wouldn’t get back until noon, having spent the morning dispensing tea bags and toilet rolls to every floor of the huge building. In the evening she would be off out again to take care of another couple of cleaning jobs in an advertising agency and an insurance broker’s. I often went with her to lend a hand on the evening jobs. Although I would have preferred to do my homework or watch telly, I knew that if I stayed at home I would be left with Dad and he might start to touch me again.

I began to look forward to going cleaning. I’d look at the people in the town centre, all finished work for the day, and I imagined the normal lives they were going home to. I knew by this time that my life was anything but normal.

Unfortunately, going cleaning with mum every evening wasn’t enough to save me from Dad’s attentions. When we got back around 9pm, he would usually be watching the little portable television in his bedroom upstairs. Kat would already be in bed asleep, and while Mum made herself a couple of tea, she would flick on the television in the dining room and settle down for a couple of hours until bed. Dad would call out for me, and I had no choice but to go up to his bedroom to see what he wanted.

‘Come and sit beside me,’ he’d say. ‘You’ll like this programme.’

Once when I said I would rather watch it downstairs, he launched himself out of bed naked and grabbed me by the hair. ‘What am I, black or something, you cunt?’

Racism came as naturally to him as breathing. I’d had a Jamaican school friend called Janet for a while but when she came to pick me up at our front door, she heard Dad shouting ‘Tell that coon to fuck off back to the jungle. Fucking golly-wog.’ Understandably the friendship didn’t last long after that, although her mother was still very friendly to me if we passed on the street.

There was never any way out of the situation, so I had to go upstairs and sit on top of the bedcovers watching telly with him, or playing a game like I-Spy. He could be so nice when he wanted to be that it was almost hard to reconcile the nice
dad with the nasty dad. When he was nice, it was hard to believe he could ever be nasty, and when he was nasty it was almost worth it to have him be nice for a while after. But then things took another twist.

‘Why not put your nightie on so you’re nice and comfy?’ he suggested. I didn’t want to but rather than risk angering him, I pulled on my long blue nightie but kept on a T-shirt underneath so that I wasn’t showing my bare arms or the ‘V’ that dipped at my chest.

Soon he began to insist that I wore my nightie every night and this became the new routine.

‘Get under the covers or you’ll get cold,’ he said next.

Once I was lying beside him under the duvet, he stopped asking me to do his feet. Instead he would turn away from me onto his side and demand I ‘do’ his back. I would have to stroke him for ages and it was much worse than doing his feet. My arm would be shaking with the effort of keeping it raised and in motion. Periodically he’d bark out orders such as ‘Lower!’ or ‘Over my ribs!’ If I didn’t do it right, he might grab my hand and guide it with his own, such an edge creeping into his voice that I’d try to make more of an effort. I’d have to sweep down low over the tops of his buttocks and up again around his ribs and chest. He’d shiver and get goosebumps, and that’s how I knew I was doing it right. If my arm got tired or I was slap-dash and my touch wasn’t light enough, he’d get really angry. He was fond of pinching me, giving a sharp little twist at the end that always left a nasty bruise.

But when I did the stroking right he’d compliment me on having the lightest touch he’d ever felt. He said nobody could
stroke him as well as I could. I was happy to please him because it meant not getting hurt. I would have much rather been doing something else like any other child my age but, as always, I’d do anything so he wouldn’t be angry.

When it was time for me to go to bed, I climbed out from under the covers and bent down to give him a kiss goodnight. I would pretend he was like any other dad, not violent or peculiar in any way, and when he gave me a kiss on the cheek and a big cuddle, I felt happy. But more often than not he would then pull me down on top of him, and without the jeans and the belt buckle to blame it on, it was obvious he had an erection. I was confused and distressed at first, but it soon became so common that I didn’t think anything of it.

One night, just after my twelfth birthday, he pulled me on top of him, still above the duvet while he was naked underneath, and he ran his hands up and down my body in a way he’d never done before. It was almost frenzied, and as he cupped my buttocks in both his hands and pushed his erection into my stomach, his fingers pressed between my legs so hard that it hurt. I winced in pain, trying hard to disguise my discomfort. There was no way I could lie to myself and pretend it wasn’t happening. Once he’d started this new thing, he began to do it every night.

Once Mum walked into the bedroom with a cup of tea while I was lying on top of him with his fingers between my legs, and I looked up, alarmed. What would she say? Surely she couldn’t approve of him doing this? But as quickly as she’d come into the room, she backed out again, her face giving no clue about her feelings. By this time I knew she was
aware of Dad’s preoccupation with me, and rather than hit him over the head with a frying pan, as many women would be driven to do, she felt challenged. She seemed to feel that she and Kat were battling with me for Dad’s attention and the thing she neglected to recognise was that I didn’t
want
his attention–especially not the sort he was starting to give me.

Every night thereafter Dad would go through the same goodnight routine. It went on night after night with me stroking his back, and then the hands running up and down my body. It became more usual for Dad to ‘accidentally’ play a pornographic video in front of me. He would always laugh as he heard me gasp in embarrassment. Soon he started to stroke my legs under the duvet. At first it felt nice and it was a relief to be able to relax and not feel the pain in my arms, but as much as I tried to paint the situation in an innocent light to myself, I couldn’t get away from the fact that it was odd to watch TV alone in bed with your dad.

I lay beside him in my nightie feeling very vulnerable. Tears stung my eyes as I felt his hands move up from the sides of my legs to the tops, and then circle their way down until he grabbed the inner sides of my thighs and lifted them apart. I was paralysed, unable to move. Before long, things took another, very frightening turn as, gradually, Dad began touching me between the legs. He would start by stroking the side of my leg. He’d do this for a few days and then the next time he would move to the inside of my leg. The next time he would part my legs to get better access to my inner thighs. All this would happen without any words being exchanged. And on it went very slowly so that by the time he actually made
contact with my genitals, it was as though the situation had crept up on me without my realising. But as soon as he first brushed my knickers with his little finger, as if by accident, I realised that this moment had been building up for what seemed like years, and the things I had secretly been worried about, feeling guilty and dirty for even thinking them, had finally happened. I wanted to pull away but I was too petrified to move, not only because I feared his violence but also because if I was wrong and it was all innocent, he’d know I had been thinking rude things. He would think I had a filthy mind.

By the time there was no question as to what he was doing, because he was using his whole hand to touch me firmly on the genitals, I felt it was too late to do anything. I felt complicit in some way and I was absolutely distraught and confused. The only way I could cope was to pretend it wasn’t part of the ‘real world’. It was like a dream that wasn’t actually happening. I’d try and think of other things to keep my brain occupied.

The abuse was carried out in eery silence with the sound of the telly in the background and his occasional panting breaths. Soon, although things were still unspoken between us, he became more confident and rougher in the way he touched me. It used to hurt and I began to get very sore. I would lie there, hardly daring to breathe and certainly not brave enough to complain about the pain. I could feel the bed vibrating as he masturbated himself with his other hand. I imagined jumping up and saying goodnight before retreating to the safety of my room, but invariably I couldn’t help imagining Dad running
after me, and the beating that would follow, and that was enough to keep me pinned to the bed. I wanted to move and protest, but incredibly I was still hoping that it was innocent.

If Katrina wasn’t already in bed, Mum would bring her up to say goodnight. She could see I was under the duvet with Dad, and that he was naked. I was often on the brink of tears but she would just tut and roll her eyes. I tried to catch her eye and make her understand that I didn’t want to be there, that I hated it, but she’d never look at me directly. Despite the fact she had to get up in the early hours of the morning, she never asked me to go to bed so that she could take my place beside Dad. She always waited downstairs until she heard that he had let me go back to my room.

Sometimes the session would finish with Dad jerking and groaning, and at other times he would simply stop. That would be my cue to leave, without a backward glance or a word spoken. I’d simply go to my room and for the first few months I’d cry every night as I wondered what I had done to make this horrible thing happen to me.

Most nights after Dad had finished abusing me, I’d hear him and Mum having sex. There was no escaping the sound. It seemed as though Mum moaned and groaned especially loudly, as if she wanted me to hear her. I felt nauseous, because even at that age I had a very clear understanding that Dad’s abuse of me had somehow made him excited and now he was releasing his excitement with Mum. It felt incestuous and wrong and horrible.

One night, Dad had been abusing me as usual and when I went to bed, I noticed blood had soaked my knickers. I had
started my periods. Burning with embarrassment, I called Mum to my room and showed her my knickers.

She seemed just as awkward and embarrassed as me, and refused to make eye contact. ‘Wait a minute while I get you some things,’ she said to the floor, before disappearing and returning a minute later to chuck two sanitary towels on my bed.

For the next few days, Dad teased me mercilessly about how all the dogs would be sniffing round me. I blushed as he said ‘She’s a woman now.’

He began commenting regularly on my looks and developing body. He still liked kicking, punching or spitting at me, but the rest of the time he was telling me I looked beautiful and admiring the curve of my bottom in jeans. He would make me try on clothes and tell me to turn this way and that while he admired them.

‘Doesn’t she look beautiful, Donna?’ he would say, and Mum would grunt and turn away. Once I caught the look in her eye and I could have sworn it was one of pure hatred.

B
y the time I started secondary school, Dad’s abuse of me had been going on for months. I had almost grown used to it, and whenever his hand strayed between my legs I would tune out, and think about something else until it was over. It was this, and the fact we didn’t speak about the abuse, that made it seem as though it wasn’t really happening.

On my first day at school, I remember feeling like the odd one out for a number of reasons. It wasn’t just that all the other girls had the official school blazers and were dropped off on their first day by one or other of their parents, but also because I felt tainted by the fact that Dad, the only dad I had ever known, was doing things to me most evenings that he shouldn’t have been doing. I wasn’t concerned that I was scruffy and lacking the required pencil case and geometry set listed in the school prospectus. These were minor considerations compared to what was going on at home.

Dad had taken me to the school shop in Victoria and made a great fuss about ordering me the whole uniform. ‘I hope you know how much this shit is costing me,’ he growled in my ear as the bespectacled sales assistant took my measurements. By
the time the final balance was due a week before school started, he had blown the money on a horse race so I had to make do with a grey jumper and skirt from down the market. Things like that didn’t really bother me. I had grown used to being the scruffiest kid in any class so it was all par for the course. It was the situation at home that caused me the most distress.