Mummy Knew (16 page)

During these periods Dad would spend all day drinking. More often than not he would be in no fit state to wake up for work at 3.30 in the morning, and when Mum was particularly under pressure, maybe with one of the other cleaners off sick, she’d come into my room and shake me awake so I could go and give her a hand. After a long night cleaning I would get the bus home on my own while Mum stayed on to do her extra duties, then I’d have to rush to get Kat ready and walk her to school. If I was lucky Dad would let me go to school where I’d spend all day yawning; if not he would insist I come home again.

Dad was very fussy about the glasses he drank out of. If it was gin, the glass would be long and tall, polished by Mum until it sparkled. Brandy was drunk in a balloon-shaped glass, in which he liked to swirl the amber-coloured liquid around like some sort of connoisseur. As fussy as he was about the shape and shine of his glasses, he didn’t seem to notice that he himself looked like a tramp going through a rough patch. He wouldn’t bother to shave or wash, and he’d wear the same food-stained clothes for days on end. The room in which he sat would often be overflowing with half-drunk mugs of tea, and ancient copies of
The Sporting Life
and
The Sun
.

From the minute he poured the first drink of the day, the house would go into ‘batten down the hatches’ mode. With any luck, after a few hours he would fall into a deep sleep, during which time we’d all creep about, freezing in our tracks if the floorboards creaked. On a few occasions either Mum or
I would have to rush and extinguish a cigarette he’d left to burn between his fingers. Once a cushion beside him began to smoulder and I had to extinguish it with the dregs of the ice bucket. Luckily he slept through the whole thing, filling the house with thundering snores.

If it didn’t put him to sleep, drink seemed to fuel him with a supernatural energy, so that his rages went on for hour upon hour. Once I had to sit opposite him while he questioned me at length about whether I’d eaten his last jam tart. After about two hours of something akin to the Spanish Inquisition, I confessed I’d eaten it, even though I hadn’t. I was just hoping to take my punishment and be allowed to go to bed. But instead he kept me up for another hour, flicking lighted cigarettes at my face and lecturing me on what a ‘greedy bastard’ I was.

Because he did most of his drinking at home rather than out in a pub, there was no respite. He would either drink in bed or lying flat out on the sofa, but wherever he was he would usually insist that I was there with him. There was no escape.

Drinking made him reckless in all respects. He gambled money away with careless abandon, not even bothering to study the form any more. He might as well have stuck a pin in the paper. It simply came down to whether he liked the name of the horse or not, or whether he could feel the psychic vibes. Occasionally he would win. Once he stood to win a few thousand pounds on some sort of multiple bet, but the final race in the series depended on a photo finish. Dad was pacing up and down, and swilling back his lager as he waited for the
result. The tension in the house was palpable. I locked myself in the toilet and waited to hear Dad’s roar of either jubilation or anger. I prayed it wouldn’t be the latter. It wasn’t. I could hear him jumping up and down and shouting ‘Yes, fucking, yes!’ Relief swept over me.

Although a lot of the money went straight back to the bookies he also spent quite a bit on the house. He wanted to create his own mini version of the offices where we cleaned. He ordered lots of shag-pile carpet and began stapling it to the walls in the living room. He also bought mirror tiles and stuck them absolutely everywhere. Leather sofas completed the look. I once saw a documentary about Hugh Hefner, the
Playboy
millionaire; by the time Dad had finished the renovation of our front room, it looked like a cheap imitation of Hefner’s den. But he loved it.

My thirteenth birthday passed like any other day. Birthday cakes and parties had never been part of my world, but I was disappointed that I didn’t at least have a card to open. I had long since given up hope that the lost members of my family would remember–after all, out of sight out of mind–but I did expect a card from Mum, and I felt quite disappointed not to get one. It was a Saturday morning, and usually I would have got up at 6am to go cleaning with Mum or Dad, but this week they had decided to have a lie-in, and I was grateful for that. My friends at school managed to do all sorts of interesting things at the weekend, like drama club or dancing lessons, but all I had to look forward to was a Mars bar and a packet of cheese and onion crisps during my break from pushing an industrial-size carpet cleaner or emptying bins. But the old
saying that you don’t miss what you never had is true. I was just grateful if Dad remained in a good mood for a whole day.

When Mum finally got up around 11am, I had already made Kat’s toast and done the washing-up from the night before. As she stood waiting for the kettle to boil, Kat piped up: ‘Mummy, it’s Lisa’s birthday today.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ she said. ‘I’ll get you something later, alright?’

It must have been one of those weeks when Dad had lost all the money at the bookies because when she went out later for a packet of cigarettes at the paper shop, she bought me a plastic necklace kit and handed it over to me unwrapped with the fifty pence price label still on. It consisted of a length of elasticated string and ten green plastic beads. The recommended age on the box was 6+.

I tried to hide my disappointment, but it was hard. I understood that Mum couldn’t buy me something if she didn’t have the money–there were many times we had all looked down the back of the sofa for lost change and felt as though we had struck gold if we found ten pence–but it was just the general lack of care I felt hurt by.

That’s not what spoiled my birthday though. When Dad got up, he immediately started making lewd innuendos about me being a teenager now. He kept reciting a limerick, over and over again: ‘When roses are red, they’re ready for plucking; when girls are thirteen, they’re ready for fucking.’

I would have traded all the birthday gifts in the world just to live my life without him sexually interfering with me. I knew what fucking was by now, and the thought terrified me. The words coming out of Dad’s mouth sounded like a threat.
All day I tried to keep out of his way, fearful that he would try to fulfil the lyrics of the limerick this time. I wouldn’t put anything past him.

Later that year, The Police brought out ‘Don’t Stand So Close To Me’, a song about a schoolgirl with a crush on her teacher and the teacher’s discomfort about it. Dad took to singing it to me at every opportunity. ‘I’m the teacher and you’re the saucy teenage tart,’ he’d say, getting hard at the thought.

Dad had been sexually abusing me for over a year by this stage. Ironically, it had started during one of his short sober periods, so I knew that he was compos mentis and couldn’t blame it on being out of his mind on drink. When he had been drinking heavily, he took the abuse to a new level, and there it would remain for months whether drunk or sober. It was during one of these hard drinking phases that he started removing my knickers for the first time. Previously he had touched my genitals over the top of my knickers while he masturbated himself. I felt much more vulnerable without knickers and it used to hurt a lot more afterwards because he’d try to shove his fingers inside me.

I was grateful that he never spoke on these occasions, or referred to them in any direct way in the real world. That way it was easy for me to detach myself somehow from what was happening. My mind would drift off and I’d think about school. Once I’d tried to think about Nanny and Jenny, but this was so painful that I trained myself never to do it again. I
couldn’t bear to think about people I loved while Dad was poking and prodding me between my legs. I felt dirty and the pain was too much to bear. So instead I’d think about a project I’d worked on at school or a programme on the television–casual things that didn’t matter.

It usually took fifteen minutes or so before Dad groaned and thrust his hips up into the duvet. When he’d finished he would remove his hand, leaving me so sore that it hurt whenever I went to the toilet. I would slide out the side of the bed, careful not to make sudden movements for fear of making him angry. It was easier to pretend to myself that it hadn’t happened if we didn’t speak or make eye contact afterwards. There would be no prolonged goodnight routines where I’d have to endure him rubbing his hands up and down my body. I would simply leave the room without a backward glance. He was satisfied and peaceful, lighting up a cigarette and flicking over the telly with the remote.

I was grateful if I escaped his rages and violence. I’d lie in the dark in my bedroom afterwards and sometimes I’d cry but mostly I just felt numb. After a few minutes I’d hear Mum plodding up the stairs to bed and then the noises of them having sex would begin. How could she cope when she had to get up at 3.30am? Why didn’t she ask me to get out of her bed sooner? It was in her power to save me but she never did. I was angry and incredibly sad all at the same time.

One night when Dad had been drinking brandy for most of the day, a beauty pageant came on the television. I was stroking his feet as he provided a running commentary on the girls’ figures.

‘Look at the arse on that!’ and ‘Cor, I’d love to give her one.’

My face burned in embarrassment and in a way I was glad that we were in the front room while Mum was sitting watching telly downstairs. I knew it was the brandy talking because he was being much cruder than normal.

When the programme finished, he grabbed his bottle and glass and stood up. He swayed from side to side for a few minutes.

‘Let’s go upstairs,’ he said.

‘I’ve got a belly ache,’ I replied, desperately searching for a reason not to go upstairs with him.

‘Wassa matter?’ he slurred. ‘Got a bloody cunt? I like my steaks rare.’

‘I’ve got to do my homework,’ I tried. ‘It’s got to be in tomorrow.’

‘Fuck the fucking homework,’ he said.

I was all too aware I had strayed into dangerous territory and he was becoming angry.

He slammed his foot down on my bare toes and I let out an agonised cry.

‘What is it? Don’t wanna be with me all of a sudden?’

‘No, Dad,’ I said, drawing my grazed feet beneath me.

‘What am I? A fucking coon, like the wogs at school you wanna hang around with?’

I hated Dad with such a passion that day that I fantasised about smashing the big marble ashtray onto his head. My left foot was throbbing. I didn’t want him to hurt me any more but when he insisted I go up to his room and lie down in the
bed beside him, I didn’t think I had any choice in the matter. I knew that after fifteen minutes of pain and humiliation, I would be allowed to go to my own room and get a good night’s sleep. But on this occasion things were to get even worse than they had been before.

Fuelled by brandy, Dad escalated my abuse to another level. Instead of simply using his hand on me that night, he ripped my knickers off, crouched down on his knees and began to lick me between the legs. I was as shocked as the first time he touched me. I couldn’t quite believe what was happening, except it was all too real. The more I squirmed away the more he dug his nails into my thighs and pulled me towards him. After a while, he stopped, looked down at his erect penis under the duvet and began to masturbate.

I had never cried openly while he abused me before, because somehow that would be breaking the spell of silence that existed between us. But now that he had taken it to another revolting level, one that was impossible to pretend wasn’t happening, I couldn’t stop crying. Whether it was because he was drunker than he had been for a long time or not, I don’t know, but the sounds of my distress didn’t seem to bother him. If anything they spurred him on.

I realised there was no point in holding back my cries. I wanted Mum to hear. I wanted her to help me. I was fed up with keeping quiet. Usually, when Dad touched me, whether we were in the bedroom or on the sofa in the front room, I didn’t dare utter a sound in case Mum walked in on us. I was ashamed and I believed she would blame me because it was easier. Dad had never needed to instruct me to keep it as our
little secret. The overwhelming guilt and shame I carried every day ensured I wouldn’t tell a soul, and the very real threat of violence ensured my silence and cooperation.

Besides, who did I have to tell? I was completely isolated from anyone who could possibly have helped me. Mum was choosing to turn a blind eye and making things easy for him. I couldn’t imagine any of my friends’ mothers allowing their husbands to watch telly naked in bed with their daughters every night. All she had to do was sit in the front room with us each evening instead of watching the same programme downstairs on her own. As for seeking help from someone at school, or even the police, the possibility didn’t even enter my consciousness. In a strange way, the last thing I wanted was for anyone else to find out. It was too shameful.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that Dad was abusing me with his mouth between my legs, he also started talking about it for the first time, and the words he used were bewildering and distressing in the extreme.

‘Lovely tight pussy,’ he said as he came up for air. ‘You’ve got such a pretty cunt. I love plating you.’

It wasn’t until much later that I worked out that ‘plating’ was slang for licking the plate, a crude reference to oral sex.

I tried to go off in my head, thinking about what was happening in
Coronation Street
or
Crossroads
, but his assault on me was so direct and present that I found it impossible to be somewhere else. My life had just got a whole lot worse.

Soon licking wasn’t enough and he started to bite me, savaging my private parts with his teeth, causing unbelievable pain. I screamed at the top of my voice and he suddenly
stopped what he was doing, sat up and raised a hand as though he was going to punch me. I couldn’t look him in the face so I shut my eyes against a vision no child should ever have to see. When he started again, I bit my lip until it bled to stop myself crying out.