The Little Prisoner (16 page)

‘He just went fucking loopy,’ she told me, ‘kicking in all the doors and everything.’

Although she never told me the cause of their row, I believe he’d picked a fight with her for producing so many boys and never giving him a girl of his own.

She was begging the nurses to keep me in for longer to ensure that Emma and I were safe. They weren’t keen to keep me in hospital any longer than they had to, as they needed the bed for new cases, but they agreed to give me one more day.

A few hours after Mum had gone, Richard turned up, all smiles and charm.

‘You ready to come home then?’ he asked, picking Emma up and giving her a cuddle. He was always so lovey dovey with Emma. He was never like that with anyone else.

‘Yeah,’ I said, careful not to let a flicker of my true dread show through as I got Emma’s things ready.

As soon as we got back to the house he made it obvious that he was going to do nothing to help Paul and me get rehoused, his only concern being how long it would be before he and I could start having sex again.

‘You think you’re going to get out of here, don’t you?’ he taunted me. ‘But you ain’t going nowhere. I’m never gonna write that fucking letter for you.’

The only way that the council would find us a place would be if we were going to be made homeless, which meant that Richard or Mum had to write a letter saying they were going to be throwing us out onto the street. Richard refused to do it and forbade Mum from doing it either. As long as they said they were happy to house us, the council would not give us anything of our own.

Paul did his best to cope with living with Richard but I could see that if we didn’t get a place of our own soon he would be driven away and Emma and I would be left there with Silly Git on our own. I began to wonder if maybe that was Richard’s plan. Now he had Emma, why did he need Paul around any more? There were moments when he seemed to believe that Emma was actually his own daughter, as if she was a product of one of those dreadful nights when we had slept together like a married couple.

A health visitor came to see us and not realizing Richard was only my stepfather, she commented how much Emma looked like her granddad. I felt a chill run through me. Even though I knew it wasn’t possible she was his, the thought of it made me want to die.

‘I can’t cope any more, Mum,’ I told her once he was out of the house. ‘I have to get out of here, you know I do.’

Then Mum did the bravest thing I can remember her doing. Maybe the fact that there was a baby in danger now as well as me made her decide to take a risk. Maybe she could remember the early days when she used to have to take me to the toilet with her in order to protect me from my stepfather. Whatever it was, she wrote the letter for me.

‘Get down to the council offices now,’ she said, pushing it into my hand, ‘as quickly as possible, before he finds out and comes after you. Don’t look back, just get on the bus and go.’

All the way there my heart was in my mouth, my eyes swivelling round every corner, terrified that Richard would appear behind me and start a scene, grabbing the letter and dragging me back home by my hair, as I’d seen him do to Mum so many times when we were children. I knew that he was perfectly willing to make scenes in public. I sometimes thought he could kill someone in the middle of the street in broad daylight and no one would have the nerve to do anything about it.

The council acted quickly once they had Mum’s letter and we were allocated a flat four weeks later. I still wasn’t sure that Richard would allow us to physically leave the house but, to my surprise, he let us move out without making a fuss.

I couldn’t believe it. I was actually out of his house for the first time since I was four. How could it all have ended so easily when it had been so hard to escape him for so long? One minute I was telling myself it was too good to be true, that it must be a trap of some sort, the next I was overwhelmed with excitement at the thought that my ordeal might finally be over and that now I could live in peace with a man who loved me and take care of my beautiful baby.

The flat was up about eighty stairs, with views over the whole town. On our first night there Emma slept through the night for the first time ever, as if she instinctively knew that she could now relax. The neighbours were all very friendly, although God knows what they were up to. The smells coming through the walls from next door had me high most of the time. I was so innocent that when they came knocking on the door asking for scales I thought they were planning to do a bit of cooking, not weighing up ‘gear’ to sell. Eventually the police surrounded the block and told us all to stay in our flats. There was then a lot of shouting and banging before they drove off with my neighbours and life went back to normal. It might not have sounded like the ideal place to be bringing up a baby, but to me it seemed like paradise.

Was the nightmare finally over? Or did Richard have some vile new scheme up his sleeve? After fourteen years with him I should have known the answer to that.

Chapter Eíght

I
  should have known that Richard would never have given up that easily. If he was letting us move into our own flat it was because he had seen a way to work the situation to his advantage. How could I have been so naïve not to have realized? Knowing him as well as I did, why didn’t I see what was coming next?

The flat we were given was twenty minutes’ drive from Richard and Mum’s house and I truly thought I had got far enough away to be safe. I never stood a chance. Paul had a job which meant he left the flat at eight each morning, so every day at nine, after my brothers had gone to school, Richard would turn up at the front door. What could have been better for him? He had Emma and me all to himself with no chance of other family members turning up unannounced to disturb him. He had a flat with a double bed in it and knew Paul wouldn’t be back until the afternoon. His reign of terror over me could continue uninterrupted.

Paul knew that Richard dropped in all the time, although he didn’t know the half of it. If Richard was still there at a time when Paul might come home early I would slip the chain on the door so he wouldn’t walk in on us. When I heard his key in the door I would have time to stop Richard doing whatever he was doing and get to the door to unchain it. By being too terrified and ashamed to tell Paul what was going on, I’d given Richard another weapon with which to control me. Now I wasn’t just frightened of what he would do to me and Mum and Emma if I betrayed him, I had Paul to think about as well. It felt as if my head was going to explode with it all.

I tried inviting friends round at the time Richard would be there so that he wouldn’t be able to get me on my own, but he would just threaten and insult them and they weren’t willing to put up with his rudeness, so he was able to get rid of them within a few minutes.

I tried developing a few techniques of my own, like saving up Emma’s feeds until I knew Richard was due to come round, then making him hang about and wait while I made her comfortable, and taking as long as possible about it. The trouble was he always would wait, having nothing else to do, and in the end I would still have to give him what he wanted, so I would just have delayed the inevitable.

After he’d done whatever he wanted, he would sometimes make me go back with him to Mum’s house, bringing their beloved granddaughter with me. Later he would bring me back to the flat and make me do it all again before Paul got home. If I tried to hide from him, pretending I wasn’t in when he rang the intercom downstairs, he would just kick the main door open and come up anyway; the lock wasn’t strong enough to keep him out.

Sometimes I would go to other people’s houses, but he would bring my brothers round to help him root me out and to look after Emma while he had his way with me in another room. If there was no answer when he knocked on the door, he would sometimes send them up the fire escape to peer through my patio doors while he came in from the front, like a hunter sending the ferrets in to flush out a rabbit.

When the boys were around we had to act out a charade, with me saying, ‘Can you look at such and such for me?’ and going into the bedroom or bathroom with him to look at some fictitious problem. He would order them not to move and to stay with Emma till we got back.

Although I loved Paul and I knew he loved me, it was impossible to carry on a normal relationship with so many stresses and such terrible secrets coming between us. By the time he got home from work I would be in such a state I would have to take it out on someone and he was such a kind, patient man he would get it all, without having any idea what he was doing wrong.

In the end I could see no choice but to finish our relationship. I loved him, but I knew that I was ruining his life and I could see no way that things could ever be any different. He was such a good man, always handing over his pay packet and putting up with whatever I said, but perhaps deep down I resented the fact that he wasn’t rescuing me. How could he, when he didn’t know the trouble I was in? He saw Richard’s moods and knew what a terrible influence he was on me, but he had no idea of the abuse that was going on every day while he was out at work.

He begged me not to end it and I felt terrible about doing it, but I couldn’t cope with everything that was going on in my head. I wanted to make him hate me so he would go under his own steam and I wouldn’t feel so guilty, but it didn’t work. Still, I finally convinced him that I was serious and that the relationship had to end.

After that I moved into a flat on my own, which meant that I didn’t have to worry about Paul and what I was doing to his head, but also meant that Silly Git had even more unrivalled access to me. To make matters worse, this flat was closer to his home than the first one, only five or ten minutes’ drive away. It felt as if I was being reeled back in.

Sometimes my brother Pete would let himself into my flat as well. I would just come home and find him there. At first he would try to pretend that I’d left the door open but eventually he had to own up that he had a key. I felt I had no privacy or independence, but he just laughed my protests off.

Richard made it clear from the first day that the flat was his territory now. If he was sitting in the armchair smoking a cigarette, he would casually tip the ashtray onto the floor and watch as I scurried around clearing it up and assuring him that it wasn’t a problem. If I made him a cup of tea he would knock the mug onto the floor and ask for another. After all the years of training I knew better than to show him anything but a cheerful face and endless politeness. If I didn’t co-operate I knew I would suffer the consequences.

In the past I’d been frightened that Mum would suffer too, and now there was the added fear that Emma might be used against me. Richard had taken all my boyfriends away from me whenever he chose, what was to stop him taking Emma away if I displeased him? Nothing. I was more trapped than I had ever been.

In an attempt to find some form of freedom, I started spending my milk tokens on bottles of wine. Emma had come off the bottle when she was one, so I didn’t need to use them for her any more. I was drinking far too much, but still I couldn’t escape. Richard was entirely in control. He told me what time I should be up in the morning, what time I should be home by in the evening and what time I should go to bed. He told me how to decorate the flat and what furniture to buy. If he had any old stuff around the house that he wanted to get rid of he would instruct me to buy it off him. He ruled my life as if I was still a small child and still I had to keep smiling and keep being grateful.

I did at least have one ally at the new flat in my friend Cheryl, who lived nearby. About a year after we moved in I told her everything, which meant she was one of the very few people who knew the truth about what was going on inside that flat. Cheryl had had similar experiences herself and not only did she understand that these things happened, where most people chose to believe they weren’t possible, but she also knew how they made you feel, how they left you so terrified that you would rather see your whole life fall to pieces than disobey the orders of your torturer. She had been brave enough to speak out about what had happened to her, but knew better than to try to push me into it before I was ready. She would just try to help in any way she could, coming round and sitting with me if she knew Richard was there and ignoring his insults and abuse as he tried to get rid of her.