The Little Prisoner (19 page)

Chapter Níne

I
t was two o’clock in the morning and Steve had finally reached the end of his tether. I was about to lose everything I loved again. If I didn’t do something to save the situation now I would spend the rest of my life alone and enslaved. I would never be able to break the cycle.

All I had to do was tell Steve the truth, but I just couldn’t bring myself to speak the words. It should have been so easy to do, but it was as if a part of my brain was paralysed, refusing to say the words that needed saying, to tell the story that would explain everything to the one person who could help me to escape. There had been so many secrets locked up inside my head for so many years that I’d lost the ability to say what I wanted, even when my happiness and the happiness of the two people I loved most in the world depended on it.

I felt frightened, guilty and embarrassed, all at the same time. I wanted to tell Steve everything, but I was afraid of the possible consequences. It seemed to me that he would be unable to understand why I was so frightened, that he would refuse to keep the secrets, that he would want to go to the authorities and seek revenge, and then we would all be in danger.

‘It’s not you,’ I kept assuring him. ‘It’s not you.’

‘So what is it?’ he wanted to know, his anger and frustration at our lack of lovemaking made worse by tiredness. He was such a kind and patient man and I was driving him away, ruining his life just like I’d ruined my other boyfriends’, and just like I was ruining my baby’s. It seemed that anyone who came close to me was immediately sucked into my terrible world of secrets and pain and fear. I had to do something to stop Steve from deciding that there was no future for us, to stop the relationship crumbling away to nothing, leaving Emma and me totally alone and vulnerable once more. I had to make him understand what had happened to me, why it seemed as if I was losing my mind, but I could no more find the words than jump from an aeroplane without a parachute. It was no good, I told myself, I was going to have to make the jump, I couldn’t put it off any longer.

‘There’s something I have to tell you …’ I said, but as I opened my mouth I saw all the terrifying ramifications of what I was about to tell him and my nerve deserted me again. ‘I’ve got to get Cheryl!’

‘What do you mean?’ He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. It must have seemed as though he was living with a total madwoman.

I didn’t stop to explain any more, I just ran out of the flat in my dressing-gown, leaving him open-mouthed and confused at the window as I stumbled tearfully down the road to Cheryl’s house and hammered on the door to wake her up.

‘What is it?’ Cheryl’s head popped out of the window upstairs. I could hear her husband’s sleepy voice in the background asking what was going on.

‘Is she alright?’ I heard him say.

‘I really need you,’ I called up, my throat so tight I was choking on the words as I fought back the hysteria. ‘You’re going to have to come with me.’

Cheryl probably wasn’t too thrilled at being woken up and dragged out into the cold night, but she was the only person in the world who really understood what was wrong with me.

She bustled back across the road with me, tying up her dressing-gown cord as she went, probably eager to get me back indoors before I woke the rest of the street up. She was such a good friend I knew she would do whatever I asked of her without hesitation. I’d always been lucky with my friends – the ones I was allowed to keep.

Now I knew there was no going back. I had made the jump from the plane and was plummeting towards the earth. Steve was going to find out everything over the next few hours.

I was already regretting taking the plunge. Steve was such a straightforward bloke. Until he met me his answer to anything like this would just have been to go to the police and report it, but in my world things were far more complicated than that. I was so frightened I wouldn’t be able to explain to him how important it was that he guarded my secret as closely as I had guarded it all these years. I knew how much it was going to hurt him and I wasn’t sure he would be able to control his anger. I was terrified of what he would do and what the consequences would be.

He was waiting for us in the front room. His anger had subsided now that Cheryl was there, just leaving the puzzlement and an air of tension as he waited to find out once and for all what was going on. He must have known that he was about to discover something bad and it must have made him nervous. What secret could be so terrible that I had allowed it to almost drive us apart when we loved each other so much?

I’d already told Steve a bit about what had happened to Cheryl when she was a child, probably because I was trying to edge him towards understanding my world even before I was ready to tell him the truth, but I don’t know if he had completely believed it. People who have had safe, protected and loving childhoods find it almost impossible to believe what goes on in the sort of homes Cheryl and I come from. It takes them time to be able to imagine the sorts of horrors that are forced on children like us and even once they accept them as true I think they push them to the back of their minds. There are lots of things we all push to the backs of our minds, aren’t there?

I put on the kettle and made us all a cup of tea – it’s my answer to everything. I’ve always been a right old teapot. Also, the ritual of sipping from mugs would help to distract us from what we were going to have to talk about and it was only polite to offer poor Cheryl some hospitality after dragging her out of bed to do my dirty work for me. Emma was asleep in her cot, unaware of anything.

Eventually Cheryl and I sat on the sofa together with our mugs of hot tea, huddled like small children, while Steve paced round and round the room, unable to sit still as he waited to hear the explanation for everything that was going wrong in his life.

‘Listen, Steve,’ Cheryl started. ‘I know you know what happened to me when I was a kid.’

He didn’t answer. I could see that he was concentrating hard, trying to take in every word she said, making sure he understood it and didn’t miss anything.

‘Well, the same thing happened to Jane with her dad.’

‘With Richard?’

You could almost see the words sinking into his mind, taking shape, conjuring up images almost too horrible to bear.

‘When did this happen then?’ he asked, his voice shaking.

‘From when she was four,’ Cheryl said.

‘Until when?’

‘About two weeks ago.’

Steve paced faster as he thought about the life I’d been forced to lead while he’d been out at work. Cheryl kept talking, although I’m sure most of her words must have been washing over Steve by that stage, like trying to empty a bucket of water into a narrow bottle all at once. I sat hunched beside her, every muscle trembling, my mug and cigarette shaking in my hands as I rocked rhythmically back and forth, as I so often did.

‘I knew it,’ he exploded once the truth had sunk in. ‘I fucking knew it.’

‘What do you mean?’ I wanted to know.

‘Ever since I met you I’ve been getting these images of you and him in my head and I’ve always thought to myself, “You sick git!” But I never imagined anything like this.’

Cheryl put her arm around my shoulders to try to calm my shaking.

From being gob-smacked Steve became furious, shouting and raging around the room.

‘Stop being angry!’ I screamed, putting my hands over my ears. ‘You’re making me feel like I’ve done something wrong. This is why I didn’t want to tell you!’

Steve didn’t want to know the details, but he couldn’t stop himself from asking. As he heard them, and fitted them in with the things he already knew about my family, I could tell that he had grasped the full horror of the situation. He could see that there was no way we could put right what had happened in the past, but that we had to think of ways to make the future better.

Once he’d got over the shock, his first thought was that we had to go to the police. I had to convince him that I truly didn’t want him to do anything about it and wasn’t prepared to go to the police or do anything else that would aggravate the situation.

After that, his only thought was that he had to get me away from the area. We decided to make a run for it, taking Emma with us and not telling anyone where we were going, not even Paul. It was going to be a hard thing to do, leaving friends and people who had been good to us without even saying goodbye, but we couldn’t take the risk of my stepfather going after someone he believed knew where we were. If he thought for a moment anyone had an address for us, he would beat them mercilessly until he got it out of them. Everyone knew that his rages were uncontrollable when anyone tried to stand up to him or frustrate him. It was even more urgent that we got away soon because I wanted to be gone before my family knew anything about my new pregnancy. I wanted my new baby’s life to be completely untainted by them.

The morning after he learned the truth Steve got up at the normal time, no longer willing to wake up before dawn in order to get away unseen. It was as if the gloves had finally come off. He was still in shock when he got into his car and drove to work. A few streets away he found himself in traffic and spotted his mum in the car in front. He flashed her frantically until she pulled over. Collapsing into tears, he told her the whole story.

‘We’re gonna have to move from the area quick time,’ he said.

‘Whatever you need, we’ll help with,’ she told him, ‘anything we can do.’

I’d known that Steve would have to tell his parents about what had happened to me, because that was the sort of relationship he had with them. But even that was hard because although Steve’s dad was a tough man, neither of his parents were young and I knew what my stepfather was like with his threatening phone calls, his notes through the door and the hours he would spend sitting in the Cortina outside people’s houses flashing his lights onto the windows and beeping his horn over and over again. He knew how to make people aware that they weren’t safe anywhere, especially in their own homes. He was always a master at making people’s lives a misery.

I trusted Steve’s parents, but I was terrified by the thought of anyone else knowing about our plans. The more people who knew, the greater the danger that word would get back to my stepdad and the more certain it would be that he would take it out on me when he found me. It had always been his golden rule, right from the first moment when he pressed the carving knife against my throat, that no one must ever know what went on between us when we were alone or he would kill me and Mum. Nothing he’d done in the seventeen years since then had given me any reason to doubt him. If he found out that I had talked before we managed to get away from the area, the consequences were unthinkable.

I was particularly careful to keep everything from Cheryl, because for some time she had been the one who was most likely to get trouble from Richard because of the way in which she had protected me. Even though she was as scared of him as everyone else, she had always felt she had something over him because she knew what he was up to with me, and that had given her the courage to face him down.

Paul had been telling Steve he should take Emma and me away from the area for some time. Although he would miss seeing his daughter, he had realized that there was no other way out for us. I felt terrible at the thought of not keeping in contact with him, but I knew I couldn’t, because Richard and my brothers would be putting pressure on him to tell them where I was. I just hoped that he would understand why.

I would have to cut off all my friends in just the same way. I couldn’t take the chance of them being intimidated into giving us away. If any of them stored my new number in their mobile phones, for instance, and those phones fell into unfriendly hands, I would soon start receiving abusive calls and it wouldn’t be long before I was getting visits again. I had to cut myself off completely

Richard didn’t make direct contact with me for several weeks after I confronted him, which gave us a chance to lay our plans, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t still a presence in my life, hovering threateningly in the background, letting me know that he could reappear in my life whenever he decided. The Cortina would often be in the street outside the flat, the horn going and going and going, making me want to scream.

One evening Steve went out to buy a kebab and chips, since I was still too scared to even go into the kitchen to cook in case Richard barged in through the back door. He was ages coming back and I began to worry as I hid in the bedroom. When he did eventually reappear, he was shaking like a leaf. He climbed out of the car, dragging our supper after him, ripping the bag so that there were kebab and chips falling all over the place. He had taken to carrying a hammer under his seat in case Richard had ever got him cornered in the street, and he held it in his other hand. As he stumbled towards the flats he trod on some of the fallen food, skidded and fell heavily on the steps. By the time he finally got into the flat he was gasping for breath, almost overcome with adrenaline.