The Little Prisoner (15 page)

‘Okay,’ he agreed, and we stopped at a garage to buy some. I felt as if I was on my way to my own execution.

It was the middle of the afternoon. We drove around the country lanes looking for a spot that Richard thought would be safe. Eventually he found a relatively secluded car park. There were a couple of other cars already parked there, one with some people in.

‘We’ll wait for them to go,’ he told me, making me kiss him and touch him while we waited. To any casual passerby we would have looked like any couple out on a date – a sixteen-year-old girl with a thirty-year-old man, not such an unusual sight – and I hated the fact that anyone might think I was actually with him by choice.

About ten minutes later the people in the other car still weren’t showing any signs of going and now and then other people were walking past with their dogs, enjoying the scenery. I was beginning to hope that I would get away with it, for one day at least.

But now that Richard was aroused there was little chance that he was going home without having what he had been thinking about all day. Eventually he couldn’t wait a moment longer. He was going to do it whether there was anyone watching or not.

‘Lie your chair back,’ he instructed. ‘Pull your skirt up and take off your knickers.’

He climbed over to my side of the car. Pulling his trousers and pants down, he put on the condom and had full sex with me for the first time. Even after all the years of abuse and humiliation, this still seemed much worse. I couldn’t stop myself from crying, even when he ordered me to shut up. The smell of his breath on my face made me feel sick and the fact that he kept kissing me as he was doing it made me want to throw up. I wasn’t sure if it was technically a rape, since I’d known he was going to do it and hadn’t tried to stop him, but I felt as if I’d been raped. It was almost as if he had spent the previous twelve years preparing me for this.

That year Mum got a job helping out as a secretary at the boxing club my brothers went to. That meant it was just Richard and me in the house three nights a week. When I got home from work at seven the lights would all be out, so I couldn’t see where he was, but he would always be there, waiting in the dark, calling me into the living room for sex. I tried to put him off me by not washing properly, but it never made any difference to him. If I was even one minute late home he would throw my dinner in the bin and I would have to go to bed hungry, but I would still have to perform whatever tricks he had been dreaming up for me all day. It seemed the older I got, the more he was going to treat me as his sex slave. I couldn’t imagine how I was ever going to escape him now.

Chapter Seven

A
fter Joe came Paul. I met him at a party when I was about to turn seventeen and he walked me home, but I wouldn’t let him kiss me goodnight, even though I was very keen to see him again. He must have been keen as well, because he didn’t allow my initial reluctance to put him off. He was four years older than me and, as with Joe, I started sleeping with him after we had been going out for about three months.

Richard, no doubt relishing the opportunity for another game of cat and mouse, encouraged the match, even allowing Paul to stay in my room when he was round at our house. Paul was one of those easygoing types that Richard particularly liked because he could make them do pretty much whatever he wanted.

As always, though, it was impossible to know where we were with Richard. One day he would be welcoming Paul into the house and treating him like a friend, the next he would be telling me to get rid of him and becoming angry that he was even daring to knock on the door. I would get into trouble with Richard if Paul came knocking when he didn’t feel like seeing him, and I’d also get into trouble with Paul, who never knew whether I was going to invite him in with open arms or send him packing with no explanation. The fact that Richard let us sleep together quite openly, however, seemed like a move forward. I was beginning to be awarded some of the privileges of being an adult.

One morning Paul and I were still asleep in my bed when Silly Git came crashing into the room. He seemed to be looking for something as we struggled to wake up and work out what was going on.

‘Where are they?’ he wanted to know.

‘Where are what?’ I asked sleepily

‘Where are your fucking pills?’

‘What pills?’

‘You know,
the
pill.’

‘Over there,’ I nodded towards my dressing table. ‘Why?’

‘Because they’re going down the fucking toilet,’ he said, taking them out of the drawer and walking out to the bathroom. ‘It’s time you made me a granddad.’

We could hear him going into the bathroom and then there was the sound of the toilet flushing. My mind was racing, trying to work out what this might mean and whether it was a trick or a potential way out for us. Richard never did anything without a reason and if he wanted us to have a baby it wasn’t because he thought it would make us happy. He would be doing it for himself in some way, but I couldn’t work out what his angle was. For a while I pretended that I didn’t want to have a baby. knowing that if Richard thought he was pleasing me he might change his tack, but secretly I was very happy about the idea of having a baby with Paul, and he didn’t seem worried by the prospect either. I really loved him and had been dreaming for some time of starting a family with him. When I’d had time to think it through, I also decided that if I had a child it would be a way to get out of the house and get a place of my own. Finally, I thought, Richard had presented me with a way to escape him.

As always, I grabbed the chance to feel optimistic. If I did become pregnant, perhaps Richard would leave me alone at last. Surely even he wouldn’t want to do things to a woman who was pregnant by another man. I hoped this might finally be the end of it all, that he had finally grown tired of me and was willing to let me go and lead a life of my own.

Paul was just as keen on the idea if it meant that we would get a place of our own and be away from Richard’s tyrannical whims. Although he knew nothing about what Richard was getting up to with me in secret, he knew that he was an unpleasant, unpredictable and manipulative man to have in your life; he just put up with it in order to be with me and did his best to keep his head down.

For the next three months Paul and I kept trying for a baby, while Richard was careful to use a condom whenever he had sex with me. Each month I was disappointed and then in the third month my period was late. I did a test and it came up positive. I was so happy and so excited at the thought of having a baby of my own. Mum and Richard seemed to be as excited as I was, which was a bit of a puzzle, but I decided to make the most of their approval while it lasted. Maybe once I was a mother everything would change and they would start treating me as an equal.

Just because I’d succeeded in doing what he apparently wanted me to do, however, didn’t mean that I was let off my other duties to Richard. ‘Now you’re pregnant, we don’t need to use condoms any more,’ he informed me as soon as we were alone. My heart sank. How could I actually have believed that things were going to get better? He had managed to find a way of making them even worse.

In my confused state I became convinced that if I had sex with Richard while I was pregnant the baby might come out half his and half Paul’s. I think I knew that couldn’t happen, but that was what it felt like. I begged him to go on using condoms or to withdraw, but he wasn’t going to listen to anything I had to say. I felt that I was being subjected to the final humiliation. Just when I should have been at my happiest he had managed to make me feel the most suicidal I had ever felt.

I had always harboured ideas of killing myself, even as a child. Almost every day when I walked home from school with Hayley I used to pause on a bridge that went over the park, a place where all the junkies used to hang out, and talk about the attractions of jumping off rather than going home for one more night of hell. Now the idea of oblivion, with no more pain, heartache and humiliation, was becoming even more attractive.

All through the pregnancy, as I grew bigger and more ungainly, I kept believing that Richard would soon stop wanting sex, but it never happened. When my bump became too big for him to lie on top of me he would make me sit in an armchair with my bottom at the front of the cushions and he would kneel on the floor in front of me in order to get what he wanted.

Richard bullied Paul into moving into the house full time, even though he hated Richard as much as anyone else, and then set about making money out of him, charging him rent and then extra for his share of the food, gas and electric. Although he had been living at home with his mum, Paul was used to his freedom and to being treated like an adult. When Mum and Richard told him he could only bath once a day, he couldn’t believe it.

‘I have two showers a day,’ he told them, ‘one in the morning and one when I get back from work.’

‘You’ll have to pay if you want us to put the immersion on just for you,’ Richard informed him.

I was deeply grateful to Paul for loving me enough to put up with so much so that we could be together. He was a really good man and I could quite understand why he allowed Richard to bully him. He knew that if he didn’t do whatever Silly Git wanted I would be made to split up from him and he didn’t want that. We both convinced ourselves that once we had the baby we would be able to escape to a place of our own and our ordeal would be over. We were nearly at the end of it. If we could just last out for a few more months, then there was a chance that life could get better.

Every Sunday Paul would go off to play football and I would have to stay at home to do the ironing for eight people and whatever else Silly Git could dream up for me, when all I wanted to do was go and watch him, like any normal girlfriend. I would beg him not to go, but I couldn’t explain to him the true reason so he didn’t take my pleas seriously. ‘Don’t worry,’ he would say when I seemed despondent, ‘we’ll soon be out of here and then you’ll be able to do whatever you want whenever you want.’ But then he thought it was just housework that was getting me down and I could never tell him the terrible truth.

When I was nine months pregnant and exhausted, both by the pregnancy and by the emotional strains of the family, I was alone in the house with Richard one afternoon and he became cross with me for ‘looking miserable’ while I swept the stairs with a hand brush. He ordered me to scrub the kitchen floor with my toothbrush as a penance for being a ‘sulky cow’. Frightened of angering him any further, in case he hit me and damaged the baby, I sank miserably to my knees and starting scrubbing.

Mum came home in the middle of it all. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

‘Scrubbing the floor,’ I said wearily.

‘What are you using?’ She was looking at me as if I was mad.

‘My toothbrush.’

‘Why?’

‘He told me to,’ I said as Richard came into the room behind her.

He immediately pretended to be amazed to find that I was actually doing it, insisting that he had been joking but that I was too much of a ‘silly bitch’ to realize it.

At that moment something inside my head snapped and I knew I couldn’t take it any more. I didn’t know what new games he was planning for me and my baby, but I couldn’t cope with them. I just wanted to end it for both of us. I didn’t want my baby to have to come into this awful life.

I went up to my bedroom and looked around for something that I could use to cut my wrists. I found a Bic razor and tried to snap the blade away from the handle.

Mum came in and stopped me. ‘Don’t be such a stupid little fucking bitch,’ she told me.

‘But he just never stops,’ I sobbed.

‘If you kill yourself then you’ve given him what he fucking wants,’ she said.

I could see she was right, but I felt so tired of it all I wasn’t sure if I cared any more. Still I gave up on my feeble suicide attempt and went back to struggling on, hoping for the best.

When Emma was born she was beautiful and I was so proud of her. Knowing that I now had a baby who was dependent on me to protect her made me doubly determined to get out of the house, just as soon as I could arrange alternative accommodation with the council. Surely now it would only be a matter of a few weeks before we were free.

Richard and Mum came into the hospital to visit me and bought flowers and a card. It sounds such a normal thing for parents to do when their daughter has a baby, but they had never done anything like that for me before in my life, or for anyone else for that matter. It was the most alien thing imaginable. On one hand it made me think that perhaps we really had turned a corner and now that I was a mother everything would be different, but on the other hand it made me wonder what Richard was up to now. It seemed that he was genuinely thrilled by the arrival of his first grandchild, especially as she was a girl, but how many times had he lulled me into a false sense of security before, only to dash my hopes with some new horror?

Mum and Richard might have been sweet to me, but something had gone very wrong between them and two days later, when I was on the verge of being discharged, Mum turned up at the hospital with her face beaten to a pulp, black and swollen, and her ear caked in dry blood.