The Little Prisoner (12 page)

I found Tanya a little while later sitting in the churchyard near the Parade.

‘You’ve just come from there, haven’t you?’ she said, nodding back towards the house. ‘I knew you weren’t over the Parade, that’s why I’ve been sitting here. He didn’t even have the decency to do his flies up.’

I could just imagine how horrible she must have felt as she sat amongst the graves, knowing that he was doing that to her friend.

Chapter Five

I
  was quite a late developer, very skinny and undeveloped, and I didn’t have my first period until I was fourteen. I remember the moment exactly because I was round at Granddad’s, cleaning his stairs, when it came. I rushed home to find Mum and bumped straight into Richard.

‘Where are you going?’ he demanded.

‘I need to talk to Mum,’ I said, trying to get past, unable to bring myself to discuss anything so personal with him.

‘What do you want to talk to her about?’ he wanted to know. I was never allowed to talk to Mum until I’d told him what it was about. I guess he was always wary I might let one of our secrets slip out.

‘It’s girls’ stuff,’ I said, hoping he would get the message and back off.

‘Oh right,’ he said, not only immediately seeming to grasp what I was on about but also seeming to be incredibly concerned. ‘Get in there then, young lady,’ he said, pushing me towards the living room as he yelled for Mum to come.

They laid me down on the sofa and the boys were sent to get pillows to prop up my head and my legs. ‘Go get her some Doctor White’s,’ Mum said and Richard went scurrying off to the shops. ‘You’re a lady now,’ they kept saying, insisting that I didn’t exert myself in any way.

They gave me a few days off school while I continued ‘becoming a lady’ and I thought it was a pretty good scam. Had I realized how terrible my periods were going to be in the coming months, sometimes lasting for three weeks at a time with one week intervals in between, I might not have been so keen. The pampering wore off pretty quickly too. My periods also worked against me as they gave Mum and Richard more reasons to keep me off school.

I loved going to school because it meant that for a few hours each day I could do and say whatever I wanted and I wouldn’t have to pay any gruesome penalties. I revelled in my freedom and was always the class clown, known by pupils and teachers alike for my loud honking laugh and high spirits. The teachers never seemed to mind my behaviour because, unlike many of the children in that school, I was never rude and was always co-operative. I just bubbled over with the joy of escaping the house. Everyone, staff and pupils alike, always seemed to like me, which puzzled me. If I was the despicable creature that my stepdad kept telling me I was, how come no one else could see it?

Knowing that I was liked at school improved my spirits still further when I was there and made dragging myself home at the end of each day even more of an ordeal.

In the beginning I did alright, top of the class sometimes, but as I got older and I was expected to do homework and put in the extra hours, I started to fall behind. I daresay in other schools my lack of academic results would have counted against me, but in an area like ours the teachers were happy just to have someone cheerful and enthusiastic in the classroom. They knew that I was doing my best, but that I had difficulties at home.

I must have been different from most abused children, which is probably why none of the authorities picked up on my problem. Normally they’re on the lookout for children who are withdrawn and having difficulty within their peer group, as well as for the obvious signs of bruising and other marks. Many years later Hayley told me that I did always seem to have to wear long sleeves because of bruises on my arms, but I wasn’t particularly aware of that. Most of the tortures my stepfather inflicted on me left no visible marks – the scars were all inside my head – and if ever I was badly marked I was kept off school until I had healed.

There was, however, one occasion during my first year in the juniors when my eye had turned completely bloodshot and I was called into the headmaster’s office to talk about it. When I got there I found there were some social workers waiting to see me. They must have known something else was going on because the teacher asked, ‘Did your father say he was going to kill you?’

I opened my mouth to say ‘yes’ but at that moment Silly Git burst into the room, sweating as if he had run all the way from the house. I guess they must have been legally bound to let him know or something.

‘No,’ I said quickly. ‘He only says things like that when he’s joking, like everyone does.’

‘Does he hit you?’ they asked me.

‘No’ came out of my mouth, although inside my head I was screaming, ‘Yes!’

Richard told them all to fuck off, dragged me out of my chair and took me straight home, giving me a good hiding for getting the social workers involved in our family business.

I never heard anything from any of the others. I guess they were happy to take my answers at face value.

Although the authorities probably had no reason to believe that I was being abused in the way I was, they certainly knew that my parents were difficult, violent and abusive. The teachers knew that on Mondays I wouldn’t be coming in to school because I would be picking up their social security cheques. All the people in our area who had trouble making their money last would be queuing up at the post office at the same time, the line sometimes reaching round several blocks. Even if you got there at 7.30 in the morning, you might not actually reach the counter until lunchtime, as two people tried to deal with the never-ending tide of people. There was no way Mum and Richard were going to be waiting that long in a queue themselves, so I would be sent instead. I wasn’t the only kid in the area being given that responsibility.

Whenever there was a problem at home that meant Mum was out a lot, like the months Les spent in hospital for his burns or when she went into hospital herself to have her kidney out and other operations, or to have another baby, I would be absent from school for weeks on end, shut up in the house doing chores for Silly Git, and I would never be allowed to do any catching up on the work I’d missed.

The teachers knew that I wouldn’t be able to do the homework they set me either because my parents believed that my time at home should be dedicated to the family and not to schoolwork. They probably assumed that meant I was sitting around watching television all evening rather than working like a slave scrubbing out the house and looking after the boys. They didn’t make a fuss over it – Mum had told them clearly that not only did I not do homework, I didn’t do detentions either, and they had enough problems in their working lives without picking fights with her and Richard, so they just encouraged me whenever they had the chance. When I passed a few GCSEs they all went out of their way to tell me how proud they were of me. I was surprised, because I knew I could have done much better if I’d only been allowed to study, and I was grateful to them for their kindness.

Studying of any kind was seen as a sign of snobbishness in our house. If you were found reading a book it was assumed you were putting on airs and graces and trying to prove that you were better than your parents, so none of us did it. When the school said that my brother Pete was exceptionally bright and should be put forward for a scholarship to a nearby private school, Richard said no. His excuse was he didn’t want his son going to ‘a school for gay boys’, but I guess he felt it would lessen his control over Pete and take him into an environment where he would be out of his depth.

I don’t know whether the school staff made any effort to persuade the authorities to intervene on my behalf with my family, and since my files have gone missing I am never likely to find out, but I do know there was nothing they could have done themselves without running the risk of being intimidated and even attacked in their own classrooms or on the way in or out of school. Their hearts must have sunk every time they saw another child arrive at the school with our surname, knowing it would mean being abused and shouted at during parents’ evenings. In the end they managed to get Richard banned from the junior school for his aggressive behaviour, although I can’t imagine how they enforced the ban.

If I had only known that the kindly dinner lady who always asked me how I was as I queued up for my meals was actually asking on behalf of my dad, I might have been able to get a message back to him, telling him that things were going badly and asking him to come and get me. As it was, I just thought she was a nice lady and that my dad had disowned me. The dinner lady would have seen a loud cheerful girl, eating hearty meals despite her skinny frame. There would have been no reason for her to tell Dad anything other than that I looked fine and that he didn’t need to worry.

Richard must have liked the look of me in a school uniform. I assume that was why he made me wear the stupid high-heeled court shoes when I was in junior school, and he made his tastes even more obvious as I grew older. When I was a teenager and Mum was out of the house, he would have me put on my PE skirt, long socks and top, put my hair up and slap on some make-up. He would then lie on the bed and masturbate as I walked around the room, bending over and opening drawers so he could see my knickers. I would then have to climb onto the bed and finish him off.

Chapter Síx

M
um and Silly Git basically saw education as an imposition that their children needed to shake off as quickly as possible, and even before it was legal for me to leave school they told me I needed to go out and earn a living in order to pay my way around the house.

It started out with work experience organized by the school and when the teachers asked me what I wanted to do, I said I would like to do something with small children. Although it had been too much at times, I’d enjoyed looking after my brothers when they were little, particularly Les, who had been more my baby than Mum’s really. Whenever I was at home he was always with me. Even if I went out to be with a friend or up to my room, I always had to take him with me. It wasn’t his fault – Mum and Richard just didn’t want the bother of having to look after him themselves – but it annoyed my friends to always have him tagging along.

Les ended up spoilt, though, because even though they didn’t want to look after him, Mum and Richard let him have his own way all the time. If he wanted to have something of mine I had to let him, otherwise he would scream and they would intervene on his behalf and I lose whatever it was forever. He was even allowed to call Mum a ‘fat slag’ and Silly Git would just laugh and encourage him.

When Les was a baby and I was eleven, it was my job to get up to him if he cried in the night and I had to take him into bed with me to keep him quiet. I was so frightened of doing it wrong that on the nights when he slept through I would wake up in a dazed state and think I’d lost him because he wasn’t in the bed with me. I would be crawling around the floor on my hands and knees in the dark trying to find him before I woke up enough to remember he wasn’t there.

One afternoon Mum and I went round to visit my granddad and I was starting to tell him about how I’d been crawling around the floor in the middle of the night looking for Les.

‘Shut up!’ Mum hissed and I realized I’d spoken out of turn.

‘Why was she doing that then?’ Granddad asked, obviously puzzled.

‘Oh you know her,’ Mum brushed it aside, ‘she’s just a fucking div, isn’t she?’

I realized that she wouldn’t want her dad to know that she was making me do her job of caring for the baby. I learnt to keep quiet after that.

As he got older Les became so spoilt he was impossible to deal with, so it was Tom and Dan, the middle two, who ended up being my favourite brothers.

Silly Git didn’t like the idea of me working with children, though, because it wouldn’t be of any use to him. He wanted me working in the high street. If I was stacking shelves in one of the supermarkets, he reasoned, I would be getting discounts on food for the family. In the end he and Mum found me a job in a shoe shop, insisting that I hand over whatever money I earned for my board and lodging and only leaving me enough for my bus tickets to and from work and sandwiches for lunch. It was like living with playground bullies who nick the pocket money off little kids.

Although I would like to have stayed on at school for longer and got a few more qualifications, I actually enjoyed the job and didn’t mind doing it full time. Just like school, it meant I was out of the house and safely away from Richard for a few hours every day, although he was always waiting for me when I got home.

I was amazed by how well I got on with everyone in the shop. No one was ever nasty to me, quite the opposite. Although the manageress was sometimes quite strict with the other girls, she seemed to like me, taking me outside with her every time she wanted a cigarette break and leaving the others holding the fort. ‘Me and Jane are just going out for a fag,’ she would announce to the others, and we would sweep majestically away. None of the others seemed to hold it against me, though.

The manageress’s husband also took to me and used to ask me to go out shopping with him whenever he had to buy things for his wife and needed some female advice. There was even talk of me being given a branch of my own with a flat above it, although nothing came of it.

The fact that everyone except my own family seemed to like me was probably what kept me from completely giving up on life in those early years. Although Richard managed to frighten me into obeying his every command, he never managed to convince me that I was quite the vile worm that he told me I was. If I could just find a way to escape his clutches, I knew there was a nice world out there full of nice people I could have a laugh with. It was just that I couldn’t work out how to get away from him in order to reach it.