The Little Prisoner (10 page)

Once, when I was about ten, Mum’s screams woke me up in the middle of the night. I knew that meant Richard was hitting her as usual, but this time the noises coming from the bedroom next door sounded especially loud. I was shaking and telling myself to just stay calm and it would soon all be over, it always was. I knew that if I went in he would turn his fury onto me for interfering and it wouldn’t make anything better for her. Now he was shouting at the top of his voice and there was a repeated banging noise, which sounded like her head being smashed against the adjoining wall. I was terrified that this time he really would kill her and then I would be left alone with him. As I lay there, praying she wouldn’t die, the screams stopped but the banging continued. I could hear the boys crying in their beds, too frightened to move. Mum was making a groaning noise, ‘Huh, huh.’

Fear giving me courage, I climbed out of bed and ran out onto the landing, pushing open their bedroom door. The light from the hallway illuminated the sight of my mother on all fours, wearing nothing but her knickers, while Richard stood astride her, pulling her head back by the hair, his other hand under her chin, about to smash her head against the wall again. They both froze and looked at me.

‘Leave her alone!’ I screamed.

‘Go back to bed,’ Mum whispered.

Richard looked at me for a second longer, then let my mother’s limp body drop onto the floor and started running out after me. I managed to get into my room and slam my door, but by the time I reached my bed he’d burst through and caught up with me and shouting, punching and throwing me around. It was one of the worst beatings I’d ever endured.

Then I heard Mum’s voice coming from behind him. ‘Get off her,’ she said, and it sounded as though she meant it.

I looked up and saw her standing behind him, holding the carving knife that she always kept under her mattress. She looked as though she was hyperventilating as she panted and shook with a mixture of pain, fear and rage.

Richard stopped beating me, threw me down on the bed, straightened up and walked out of the room, still shouting abuse.

Mum came in and sat on the bed, laying me across her lap and rubbing my back to comfort me. I must have been winded because I was having trouble getting my breath. I kept watching the door, knowing he would be back, that he wouldn’t be able to let her have the last word like that.

A few minutes later he was there again, exploding into the room, picking up my chest of drawers and hurling it at us. It hit me full in the back, knocking me off Mum’s lap, and she leapt up, screaming, the carving knife back in her hand, and stabbed him in the side of his stomach.

I curled up into a ball by the bed, trying to make myself as small as I possibly could. They both began to shake as they saw the blood oozing out and Mum started to apologize to him over and over again as he stood there, looking at her, his hand over the wound, the blood seeping through his fingers. Suddenly it was as if they’d never been fighting at all, as if they were a united force.

‘I’ll drive to the hospital and get it stitched up,’ he said matter-of-factly.

He left the house and Mum put on her nightie and began using towels to mop up the trail of blood which led from my room down the stairs, working like a robot.

‘Go and wash your face and sort yourself out,’ she told me.

When I limped back from the bathroom she sent me down to the kitchen to make her a cup of sweet tea for the shock while she tried to get the stains out of the carpet with soap powder and washing-up liquid. Then she came downstairs, pushing the bloodied towels into the washing machine and rinsing the knife as if removing evidence of her crime. She tidied up my chest of drawers, put all my scattered clothes away neatly and told me to go back to bed once I’d made her tea.

‘You’re not to say a word to anyone about what’s happened,’ she warned me, although the whole street must have been able to hear the screams that night. It was to be just one more secret amongst the hundreds that were already cluttering my head and my conscience.

As I climbed back into bed I sent up a prayer that Silly Git would bleed to death on the way to hospital or would become so weak he would crash the car and be killed on impact. I was really excited at the thought of him not coming back. Even if he did try to come back, I reasoned, surely Mum would leave him after all this.

The carving knife wasn’t the only weapon that Mum kept handy for when he attacked her. She had other knives around the house and a pair of shears that she kept hidden behind the drainpipe outside the back door. The funny thing was Richard knew all these weapons were there but never did anything about removing them (apart from the brass soldiers), before starting an argument with her. It was as if he enjoyed the danger.

Whenever their fights started, Mum would be screaming at me to call the police and Richard would be shouting at me not to dare. Once or twice I was so frightened he was going to kill her that I ran next door and asked them to phone for help. They did that for me a couple of times, but he made their lives such a misery afterwards that they refused to become involved after that. Eventually, they wouldn’t even open the door to me, though no doubt they could hear what was happening through the walls.

Sometimes, when Granddad wasn’t living next door, Mum would shout at me to fetch him and I would run up to his house as fast as I could. If I managed to get there in time he would arm himself with a piece of wood and come back with me to break the fight up. Usually, however, Richard would catch me before I got there, carry me back and give me a good hiding for daring to involve other people in a family matter.

In the end everyone had been alienated or intimidated and there was no one left to run to for help, so my brothers and I would sit quietly, not daring to move as Mum and Richard raged around us, just waiting for the fights to exhaust themselves and hoping she wouldn’t be killed before his temper had burned itself out.

A few hours after Richard left for the hospital I heard the dreaded sounds of his Cortina returning, his key in the lock and his feet on the stairs. To my horror I realized he was coming into my room first. I lay very still dreading what might come next.

‘Janey,’ he whispered as I pretended to be asleep, ‘I’m really sorry.’

He’d never ever apologized to me for anything before, but maybe he was only doing it now because he believed I was asleep and couldn’t hear him. He went back out and closed the door quietly. A few moments later I could hear him and Mum talking in their bedroom.

‘I told them the can opener slipped and stabbed me,’ he told her.

‘You could have come up with something better than that,’ she laughed.

They carried on chatting and laughing as if they had just enjoyed a grand adventure together and eventually I fell asleep, disappointed that they had made up and that it didn’t sound as if Mum was going to be leaving him.

The next morning they allowed me to lie in, telling the boys to let me sleep. This was another first. I got up and washed when I felt ready and went downstairs, expecting them to be angry with me. When I walked into the front room the sight of my mother shocked me. Her whole face was swollen and bruised and seemed to have changed shape from the beating she’d received. In the drama of the night before I hadn’t noticed the damage, or maybe it had taken a few hours to come through. She was barely recognizable.

Richard smiled at me cheerfully, as if this was a normal morning in a normal family. ‘Do you want some breakfast?’ he asked.

I nodded, not sure how to react to all this. To be allowed to lie in and then to have Richard make me breakfast was unheard of. I kept thinking there must be a catch. All day I was allowed to sit around and not asked to do anything. I wonder now if perhaps I was as bruised as my mother, because Richard had often kept me off school in the past when he had gone too far and left physical marks. I had no way of checking my appearance. The only mirror in the house was in Mum’s room, so I only got to look in it if I was vacuuming or taking in some washing.

Although I didn’t go back to school for a week that time, Mum and Richard soon got bored with being nice to me and by the next day I was back to doing the household chores. I didn’t speak, apart from saying ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ for a few days, until Richard had had enough and shouted at me for being a ‘sulky cunt’ and it was back to business as usual.

We all lived in hope that Richard would leave us, and those hopes were fulfilled when he got himself a girlfriend.

The first I heard of it was when Mum refused to iron his shirt for him one day.

‘Get your black fucking whore to iron it for you!’ she screamed.

He must have been waiting for an excuse, because he left immediately. The boys and I were over the moon and begged Mum not to ask him back.

‘We don’t want him back, do we, Mum?’ we said. ‘It’s all nice now.’

‘Don’t you worry,’ she assured us. ‘He won’t be back.’

She must have believed that herself, because a few days later she accepted a friend’s invitation to go out to the pub, which was something she would never do without Richard’s permission. While she was out he arrived back, bearing a big gold necklace as a peace offering. When he realized she’d gone out and was having a good time, his mood changed immediately. He waited like a thunderstorm brewing on the horizon. I’ll never forget the look of terror on her face when she breezed back in and found him there.

I don’t know what happened with the other woman; she was never mentioned again.

Thinking back now, with all that I have found out, I begin to wonder how much Mum did know about what was going on. There was one occasion particularly which didn’t make sense.

Richard was always very proud of his sheds, which he would build himself at the bottom of every garden he moved to. He built at least three different ones in the years I lived with him. They were very well built, even using proper windows, which we then had to clean as if they were part of the house. Inside, Richard’s belongings were always immaculately neat and orderly, like everything else in his life.

Sometimes I would have to go in there with him to ‘help him sort out his tools’ and he would lock the door behind us. The door had four or five bolts and a chain on the inside, so there was never any chance of us being disturbed. It was only later, when I thought back to those times, that it occurred to me how weird it was that no one else questioned why he was so keen to secure the door from the inside. To me it was just the way things were.

I remember that on this occasion he took me in there while the boys were playing in the garden outside, locked the door and made me stand in front of the window and watch for anybody coming.

‘Make yourself look busy,’ he instructed, pulling his trousers down to his ankles and standing behind the door. He crouched down and I felt him sliding his hand into my knickers, playing around with me while he masturbated himself. Just a few yards away I could see Mum washing up in the kitchen. Every so often she would look up out of the window and shout at the boys to stay off the grass and on the patio, away from the shed, which was strange, as it was summertime and they were usually allowed to play on the grass at that end of the garden.

I was staring straight into my mother’s eyes as I pretended to be tidying up the work surface.

That night I had to hide my knickers inside my dirty clothes because Richard’s hands had left big black grease marks and I was frightened Mum would see them and know what was happening.