Mummy Knew (17 page)

At last he stopped and said, ‘Have a wash and go to bed,’ before collapsing between my parted legs. A drink-induced sleep had finally arrived to save me. I pulled myself out from under him and rushed to my room, where I lay hoping to die in my sleep.

When Dad sobered up the next day, he could hardly look me in the eye. He had temporarily lost his usual confident swagger, almost as though he had shocked himself the night before. But it didn’t take long for him to do it again, and thereafter licking and biting me became his new habit.

He began to be increasingly rough. One night I couldn’t stand it any more and, in a mad moment, I rolled off the bed and ran to my room, determined that I wouldn’t let him put his mouth or hands between my legs ever again. My heart pounded hard in my chest. I reached my bedroom in only a few short steps along the landing, then time seemed to slip into slow motion as if I were in a nightmare and desperate to escape a frenzied serial killer. I stood with my back against the bedroom door feeling as though I was going to have a heart attack. Then absolute terror set in as I heard him coming after me, muttering the vilest of obscenities. I began to whimper as I felt him kick the door open behind me.

I was thrust forward onto the bed and in a moment he was on top of me, stark naked, his full weight making it hard for
me to catch a breath. Reaching up with his right hand, he grabbed a handful of my hair and shook my head viciously from side to side until I felt the hair being ripped from my scalp. Then he tore the buttons from the front of my floral nightdress and exposed my bare chest. For some reason I found this more humiliating than anything else I had suffered so far. It felt too intimate. I didn’t want his eyes on me.

Throughout he repeated the words ‘fucking bitch’ over and over again as if chanting some kind of mantra.

When he finally got off me, I was literally seeing stars. I barely felt his parting kick, but I knew I could never run away ever again. Not unless I was prepared to drive a stake through his heart first.

A new pattern was set. He finally felt free enough to roam all over my body, flipping me this way and that to derive his pleasure. Now when I went to bed I would often have to wipe his sperm from my face or buttocks. He also started to speak a lot, mainly to himself, as if narrating a porn film, like the ones he liked to play to me on his video recorder. He spoke about what he was going to do next, and throughout it all I might as well have been a dead body for all the reaction he got. I stopped crying quite so much, but inside I was a mass of turmoil. When I heard him spit onto his fingers to lubricate them before pushing them into me, it was all I could do to stop myself vomiting.

I was so sore that it burned when I peed. I kept getting a fever and a sick, dull pain in my lower back but Mum wouldn’t let me go to the doctor’s. She’d mix me a drink of bicarbonate of
soda in warm water and that would usually clear it up until the next bout. But not always.

‘Mum, please, it’s so painful, that stuff hasn’t worked,’ I cried, doubled up on the floor one day. ‘Why can’t I go to the doctor’s?’

‘It’s only cystitis, for Christ’s sake,’ she said. ‘Anyone’d think you were dying. It’s the “honeymooners’ disease”. I’m always getting it myself.’

‘But I’m not a honeymooner,’ I groaned. ‘I shouldn’t have it.’

‘Which is precisely why you can’t go to the fucking doctor’s,’ she said. ‘Can you imagine what they’d say? If you think I’m gonna put my Kat at risk from the social services, you’ve got another thing coming. You’ve made your fucking bed, now you lie in it.’

Her words were at once cryptic and clear as day. She didn’t care what happened to me. She was determined to pretend it wasn’t happening.

I waited for the day she would face up to what Dad was doing to me. There were numerous occasions when she walked into a room and he wasn’t quite quick enough to tuck his penis back into his trousers. She’d look away quickly, and continue as if she hadn’t seen a thing. There was the fact that I spent most evenings in bed with him, and he kept grabbing me in full view of her.

Once he bit me on the chest through my nightdress, pulling away just as Mum walked into the room. We all noticed the dark saliva imprint in the shape of his teeth on the fabric and Mum’s eyes widened before she set her face in its usual impassive expression.

He would openly grab my hand and make me feel his erection through his jeans. ‘Look what you’ve done,’ he’d say, leering at me, and Mum would quickly turn her face away. And now I had recurrent bouts of cystitis, and she didn’t want to know.

See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil–that was her policy. What she refused to acknowledge couldn’t harm her.

M
um had abandoned me to Dad, and since my abuse had got worse, she was having a much easier time of it. He was just as erratic and prone to fits of temper, smashing things and screaming the house down, but ever since he had knocked her teeth out he had remained true to his word and hadn’t hit her again. Instead, I became the focus of his violent rages; except with me, he had to be very careful not to mark my face.

At this stage I was still going to school at least half the time, and if he had given me a traditional black eye or any visible injury, he must have known that the authorities would start taking a very close interest. Dad was many things but he wasn’t stupid enough to bring down the whole house of cards when he could hurt me equally as much in places where the injuries stood little chance of being spotted. He found a plastic fly swot and took to smacking my bare bottom and back with it until I had red, raised welts all over the skin. There were many times when I literally found it hard to sit down, my bottom was so painful. He also used to bite me all over so that I was left with black and purple bruises in the shape of his teeth.

I knew Dad was looking forward to the day when I left school for good and there was little danger of outside agencies becoming involved in what he considered to be private family business. Then he would be able to relax, the master of his domain.

School was my only sanctuary, and I was heartsick on the days Dad wouldn’t let me go. I loved to learn. English and drama were my favourite subjects. I used to enjoy reading aloud to the class and my teacher, Miss Connelly, often said I should be an actress. At lunchtimes I sometimes went to the school library and looked for books with scripts in. I read them to myself, doing all the voices, and dreamed of performing on stage one day. I found a book all about the National Youth Theatre but didn’t dare dream I could ever attend one of their summer workshops. Drama was the only lesson where I could truly forget my problems at home. I hated myself for allowing bad things to happen to me. I was tainted, and it was a relief to pretend to be someone or something else for half an hour, even it it was only a tree swaying in the wind!

The drama studio in our school was painted red and had big floodlights hanging from the ceiling. When we were allowed to use them, the small space would heat up and the air would become acrid as months of dust burnt off. Everyone would cough and splutter, but to me the smell was pure theatre: greasepaint and alter egos.

Once the music and drama departments came together to stage a production of
The Boy Friend
, a musical set in the French Riviera in the 1920s. For some reason, despite my erratic school attendance, they wanted me for the part of Lady
Brockhurst, the domineering wife. For the first time in my life I felt special and part of something that didn’t involve violence and a heavily weighted cloak of shame. But after my initial euphoria at being chosen wore off, I started to worry about the commitment. What if Dad wouldn’t let me go to school? And how was I meant to attend the two evening performances when he never let me out after school?

As it turned out, rehearsals coincided with a phase when I was allowed to go to school more often than not. I only ended up missing a few in the end, and when it came to the two evening performances, Dad agreed I could go, probably aware that to refuse might open up a can of worms.

Karen played one of the flapper girls, glamorous to the end, and we had a laugh throughout the rehearsals. On the nights of the performance, the whole cast were peeking out through the curtain, trying to find their family in the audience. I was relieved that Mum and Dad weren’t going to attend. I would have been worried all night about him picking fights with the other parents.

After the last show, Karen and I took off our make-up and followed the sixth formers over to the pub, where we stood outside and managed to get hold of a Babycham each. I felt alive and carefree. The alcohol made me feel happier than I had felt for years.

Karen was my only friend, the one person who could make me forget my troubles at home and have a laugh. With her, I could become someone else, someone free of sexual abuse and violence. I never gave her much information about what went on at home, so school was one long drama lesson where I
pretended to be another person. She still couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t come out in the evenings. I wanted to, more than anything, but there was no way I could. Most nights I had to go with Mum on her early evening cleaning job, and then when I got home around nine o’clock, Dad would begin his nightly ritual of abuse before I was allowed to go to bed.

‘Please, Lisa, it’ll be such a laugh,’ she would say. ‘There’s a disco on.’

‘I can’t, Karen,’ I said again and again. ‘I’ve got to go cleaning with my mum.’

Once I told her that I had to be at home in the evenings to stroke my Dad’s back and feet. This was the closest I ever came to explaining what was happening to me.

‘What? That’s a bit weird, isn’t it?’ she said, frowning.

I wanted to tell her just how weird it was, but fear kept me quiet. I was frightened she would judge me, would think it was somehow my fault, just as I judged myself. What sort of girl was I to have let this terrible thing happen with my own father?

Sometimes, as I waited for the bus to go to the cleaning job with Mum, I would see Karen waving to me from over the road. It always hurt to see her out with her other friends. That’s when I realised how much I was missing out on. I was fourteen by then and meant to be enjoying the best years of my life, but instead I was cleaning offices and being sexually abused.

Sometimes Karen came and knocked for me anyway, hoping to change my mind. I’d go to the door, careful to open it only a few inches, aware that Dad was listening to every
word. She would stand on the doorstep, puzzled about how my personality had changed from only a couple of hours before at school, when I had been full of fun. I tried to flash her a message with my eyes that said ‘Please, Karen, please go away. He’s listening to us.’ I could hear Dad mumbling in the background: ‘Fucking little tart with her blonde hair. Who does she think she is?’ and often I’d be forced to shut the door abruptly if he got up to come and intervene.

Sometimes Dad would send Mum to the door to get rid of Karen. She knew as well as I did that he demanded my contact with the outside world was kept to a bare minimum.

‘She’s busy.’ Mum would say abruptly.

There was nothing I wanted more than to be free and have fun like any other teenager. After the two nights I had been allowed to take part in the school play, I developed a taste for freedom and I wanted more of it, so the next time Karen begged me to come out with her for the evening, I hesitated, considering whether there was a chance I could get away with it. She knew I wanted to, and wasn’t accepting any of my usual excuses.

‘Ask your Mum for a night off for once,’ she said. ‘Go on, Lisa, it’ll be a right laugh.’

She kept pushing me for ages until I decided to risk it. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, I reasoned. Recklessly, like an innocent man signing a confession for a moment’s peace, I said I’d call round for her later.

As soon as I left Karen at the corner of our road with a falsely jaunty ‘See you later’, the butterflies began to churn in my stomach. I walked home sick with nerves hoping that Dad
might be in a drink-induced sleep and I could slip out without him noticing. The only time I’d been allowed out over the past year was on those two nights when I was in the school play. I didn’t know how I could possibly walk in the door and announce I was going out later. It would be as alien as going home and asking my mum where my sisters and brother lived now. I knew Dad didn’t like me out of his sight, unless I was cleaning with Mum and therefore still under his control. But as I remembered the thrill I’d felt during the school play when I’d just been another free young teenager, I grew more and more excited. I realised it had been a long time since I had tried to break free. Time had passed since the last time I had tried to get away from him, and as I was getting older I thought it may be worth another try. I’d recently read a book in the school library that said if you continue to act the same way then you have to expect the same results. I decided to act differently.

When I got home, I was disappointed to see that although Dad was drinking, he didn’t look as though he’d be going to sleep any time soon. Mum had made dinner of hot dogs for us while Dad was having steak with mushrooms and his favourite Daddy’s sauce. I was starving after not having eaten all day because no one had given me any lunch money, but was so worried about what I was about to say that I could barely swallow a bite.

In the end, I just came out with it and announced at the table that I was going out for a couple of hours.

Dad looked as if I had slapped him in the face. ‘You what?’ he demanded, his mouth full of steak.

‘I’m going to knock for Karen,’ I said, avoiding his gaze but hunching my shoulders against a possible onslaught of blows.

Mum got up from the table even though she hadn’t finished and began hurriedly to clear the plates, obviously keen to distance herself from the hurricane brewing. Dad’s expression was hard for me to read, but I noticed a slight, persistent nod, as if he were acknowledging a challenge.

Without looking back, I ran up to my bedroom, fully expecting Dad to follow, but when he didn’t, my spirits soared and I began to chuckle ‘Yes! Yes!’ over and over again. Freedom had been as simple as that. Perhaps he didn’t mind after all, and even if he did, he would have to learn how to lump it as I had done for the past two tortured years. I felt sick at the thought that all I had ever had to do to escape his clutches was assert myself.