The Little Prisoner (17 page)

‘Just having a cup of tea with my friend,’ she would blithely reply as he poured out obscenities at her.

Richard and Mum would insist on taking Emma and babysitting her for me whenever they felt like it, whether I wanted them to or not. I didn’t want Richard anywhere near my baby, although I didn’t actually think he would do her any physical harm. He seemed to put her on a pedestal, as if she was the little daughter he had always wanted and never had. Sometimes I would try to stop him taking her, but I didn’t have the strength left to fight.

When Richard and Mum were going down to Southend for a holiday they said they wanted to take Emma with them, because she deserved a holiday. I desperately didn’t want her to spend that much time near Richard, but they weren’t offering a choice.

‘Promise me you’ll keep her with you all the time,’ I begged Mum, ‘that you’ll never leave her alone with him.’

‘Of course I won’t,’ she said, as if I was mad to suggest such a thing, as if she hadn’t turned a blind eye to the things Richard had done to me throughout my childhood and was still doing now, as if he hadn’t beaten her time and time again with no reason and no remorse.

I felt terrible letting Emma go and for the whole five days I didn’t step outside the flat, just spent the time frantically decorating Emma’s bedroom for when she got back, as if new wallpaper and shiny paint would make everything all right. The future seemed so bleak and I didn’t feel I had control over any part of my life, but at least I could control how nice her room was.

I hated some of the things Richard was teaching her, like calling black people ‘niggers’, which he thought was hysterically funny.

‘Your dad has just fucked off,’ he would say to her, ‘and your mummy is a fat slag and a whore.’

The more I asked him not to say those sorts of things to her, the more he did it. Almost every statement that came out of his mouth was either abusive or racist or offensive in some other way. I felt desperate when I thought that Emma might end up being affected by what she was hearing at this early stage in her life. I wanted even more to run away and hide somewhere with her, but where could I possibly go where my stepfather wouldn’t follow? I had no money, and I didn’t know anyone outside our area who could have given me shelter. If I went to the police for help he would find out immediately and Emma, Mum and I would all be in danger from the repercussions. Even though I was now an adult and a mother, Richard still seemed invincible and inescapable. If he told me to do something, I automatically obeyed. ‘You’re an unfit fucking mother,’ he would scream at me if I ever tried to argue about anything. ‘We could ring social services and have that kid taken off you any time.’ My self-esteem was so low by then I actually believed that was true. There were times when I thought about taking both our lives because I couldn’t see any other way for us to escape him.

I was teetering right on the edge of insanity, but I did still manage to keep up appearances most of the time for friends and acquaintances. Just like at school, people who didn’t know me well thought I was the life and soul of any party, always laughing and joking. Anyone who did know me well, or was around when I’d had too much to drink and allowed my feelings out, however, knew that things were different, although almost none of them knew why.

I met Steve at a party quite soon after leaving Paul and fell in love again, which was not what I had intended to do. Introducing other men into my life had done nothing but complicate things in my head and had always ended up making me miserable when I had to give them up. But something told me this one might be different. I suppose he must have started out being attracted to the extrovert girl with the loud laugh, but he didn’t seem to be put off when he found out that I was more complicated than I might at first have seemed. He wasn’t like the other men I’d known from round our way. He didn’t come from our sort of world and knew nothing of what went on there. He had a job in an office, a career plan, a suit and tie, all of which I liked even if I didn’t fully understand them.

I had mixed feelings about letting the relationship go anywhere. I was happy to have met someone like Steve, but also frightened of what would happen to his life if he became involved with us. He came from a good, steady, loving family and wouldn’t have dreamed for a second of what was going on behind the closed doors and drawn curtains in our house.

It was about three months before I plucked up the courage to let him be at the flat when my family were around. I knew Richard would dislike him immediately. He would see that he wasn’t going to be as easy to intimidate as the others. I knew he would talk about him contemptuously as ‘that white-collar wanker’ and ‘that sissy boy’.

I warned Steve that Richard would take the piss. To my amazement, he didn’t seem to be worried. ‘I’ve been called names before,’ he told me. ‘I think I can take a few more.’

‘He really isn’t a very nice person,’ I insisted.

I didn’t dare tell Steve that he had never come across anything like my family, that it might start with a bit of name-calling but if that didn’t have the desired effect it would soon escalate to violence. I just couldn’t bring myself to explain any more.

Initially, though, Richard was alright to Steve, just going through the mock strict father routine.

‘Hope your intentions towards my daughter are good.’

‘Yes, very good,’ Steve replied, innocently.

Richard then came out into the kitchen and told me what he really thought and I went back into the living room in tears, telling Steve that my dad didn’t like him. It still didn’t seem to bother him that much. It was as if he just thought I was being over-sensitive about everything.

A few weeks later when my stepdad came round to my house Steve was greeted with: ‘Oh fucking hell, not you again!’

Silly Git’s behaviour was following its predictable pattern, but Steve didn’t seem to be willing to let it get to him. He remained resolutely polite and obliging when asked to help lay patios or give the family a lift to watch the boys in a boxing match. Paul warned him not to do them too many favours or he would be sucked in, and sure enough, the first time Steve said he wasn’t able to give Richard a hand with something because he was going to the football, all pretence at being friendly ended. But still I couldn’t bring myself to explain to Steve the full extent of Silly Git’s hold over me. I did, however, tell him that Richard wasn’t my real dad, something I had told hardly anyone before.

One of the nice things about Steve is the open relationship he has with his own parents. He tells them everything. In this case, however, his openness had just the sort of effect that I had dreaded. Richard took to ringing Steve’s parents and telling them what he thought of their son and me and threatening all sorts of violence. They weren’t the sort of people to put up with that kind of rudeness and aggression without responding and in one of these conversations his mum came to my defence.

‘She’s not even your real daughter and you’re talking about her as if she’s some slag!’ she shouted at him down the phone.

Richard was immediately onto me, demanding to know who else I’d told this secret to, and as usual he managed to make me feel guilty.

One thing I was pleased about, though, was that Steve and Paul got on well right from the start, even though Richard tried to set them against one another.

‘You lot make me sick,’ he said when he came round once and found them together. Paul had come to collect Emma and Steve was waiting to take me out. ‘He’s a cunt and you’re just sitting there while he’s shagging your missus,’ he said to Paul. ‘Are you going to let him get away with that?’

‘She’s not my missus,’ Paul pointed out, perfectly reasonably. ‘I’ve got a girlfriend.’

Richard swung round and raised his fist in Steve’s face. ‘If I see you again I’ll fucking lift you.’

‘You won’t do that,’ Steve had said, ‘because then I’d just go to the police.’

‘I’d be willing to do time for you,’ Silly Git sneered, and we all suspected that was true.

If he’d had his way he would have had them both fighting it out with their fists like me and my cousin or Mum and her friends, but they didn’t rise to his bait and together their good natures and good sense were too much for him.

If he’d had a choice I think he would have liked to have had Paul back and got rid of Steve. Paul came from our area and Richard knew better how to manipulate him. With Steve he could never be sure how to act in order to get the upper hand.

My head felt as if it would burst with all the different stresses and strains and sometimes Steve would wonder why I was so moody. There was one weekend when he took me down to the coast to stay in a hotel and go clubbing and shopping and we had a really great time. It was so romantic, with drinks in the car and a red rose for me. On the way back home on the Sunday night I started to think about how the weekend was now over and Silly Git would be round again on Monday morning. The thought dragged my spirits down and I just wasn’t able to keep my good mood going. I couldn’t even pretend to be enjoying myself any more. Steve was hurt and angry that I was being such a cow after he’d done so much for me, but there was no way I could explain to him why my spirits had so suddenly deserted me without telling him everything. The first few inches of the wedge that always came between me and people I cared about had made themselves felt.

Steve did know that I was frightened of Richard, even though he didn’t understand completely why, and to please me he would agree to meet me in his car or would come round late in the evenings and leave early in the mornings, just to avoid bumping into him. We developed a code by which I would leave an upstairs light on in a window if Richard was in the flat when Steve was due to visit, and he would know not to come back until the light went out.

Steve was willing to put up with it all up to a point but, because I couldn’t tell him the whole story, he eventually found it too much and we split up. I heard the news from Steve’s dad when I phoned to talk to Steve and was told that he didn’t want to speak to me any more. Yet again my stepdad had ruined my chances of happiness with a good man and another layer was added to my despair.

This time, however, there must have been some stronger forces at work, because Steve came round to see me again after about six months, during which time his friends had got fed up with hearing him talking about me. He was shocked by the sight of me. During that short time I’d developed an eating disorder and become stick thin. I’d become aggressive and hated the whole world. I didn’t care who I upset. I’d lost all self-respect. I suppose my family were finally turning me into someone like themselves.

I was fed up with falling in love with people and having them ripped away from me and Steve and I couldn’t decide whether we wanted to stay together now or not. In the end we decided to do a test. We ripped up dozens of little bits of paper, writing ‘yes’ on half of them and ‘no’ on the other half. We then put them all into Steve’s woolly hat and agreed that we would abide by whichever answer came out first.

The first piece of paper said ‘yes’.

‘Best of three?’ we both said simultaneously.

The first three were all yeses, as were the three after that. Wondering if we had made a mistake, we checked all the others, both of us in tears, and the nos were all still there, but something or someone seemed to be telling us that we were meant to be together.

Anxious to avoid Richard at all costs, we took to living in Steve’s car all the time we were together, eating our meals in McDonald’s and using the toilets in service stations. I even had a newspaper that I’d cut two eyeholes in, so that I would hold over my face as we drove around in case anyone saw us. It was hardly a conventional relationship.

I don’t know what finally gave me the strength to stand up to the man who had been bullying me all my life. Maybe it was because he had succeeded in making me almost as hard as himself, or perhaps it was having Steve and his family as an example of how good life could be if you could live free of fear. Whatever it was that triggered it, just after my twenty-first birthday, seventeen years after social services sent me back to ‘that hell-hole’, I decided I’d had enough. Maybe it was because Emma was getting closer to the age I was when Richard first started abusing me, or maybe I had just reached a point where I couldn’t take any more without cracking up. I was beginning to have dreams in which I’d turned into a lonely old woman because no one had ever been allowed to get close to me, and sometimes I would imagine that Emma and I were dead, just because I couldn’t think of any other way out of the situation. It seemed that it was worth one last try to break free of Richard before giving up once and for all.