The Little Prisoner (20 page)

‘He spotted me when I got back in the car,’ he said. ‘He drew up beside me as I parked, so I couldn’t get away, and indicated he was going to park because he wanted to have it out. When he got out of the car I just stood on the horn, over and over. I wanted to attract your attention and bring everyone else to their windows. I couldn’t get my car window open because the handle was broken, so I was shouting through the glass at him, pointing at the faces: “See all this? Everyone knows about you!” There was a real look of panic on his face, but he was still coming at me. I didn’t hang about. I could see what he had in mind. I took off, with him after me. I wanted to draw him away from the area, so he wouldn’t go in looking for you. I went up towards the police station and he turned off. I was afraid he was coming back here, so I did a U-turn in the road and then he was behind me again. I slowed right down to ten miles an hour and he just drove off.’

Another morning we woke up to find the tyres on Steve’s car had been let down and so we had to start hiding it in other streets. Life obviously couldn’t go on like this.

One day there was a knock at the door and I found my brother Dan there. I hadn’t seen him since I’d taken my stand against Richard. He must have been about fourteen by then.

‘Alright, Dan?’ I said.

‘Dad wants all his jewellery back,’ he told me.

‘All right then, mate,’ I said, holding no grudge against him. ‘Do you want to come in while I get it?’

He shook his head and his eyes went to the ground. I could tell that Silly Git must be watching from his car somewhere. As I was keen to get rid of anything that had anything to do with him, I happily gathered up everything he or Mum had ever given me for birthdays or Christmases.

‘Tell him he can keep the lot,’ I said as I handed it back, ‘because I don’t want it anyway.’ I was surprised at my own courage in being so mouthy.

‘I really miss you,’ Dan mumbled.

‘I still love you, Dan,’ I said, giving him a kiss and a cuddle. ‘I miss you, too, and I’m sorry about everything, but it’s not my fault.’

I could see he was holding back the tears. He wouldn’t want his father to see he had been crying when he got back to the car.

Even though we were laying plans to escape from the area, Steve was still all for going to the police, believing that Richard only got away with the things he did because everyone was afraid to stand up to him. He tried his hardest to convince me, but he could see that I was not in a fit state to do anything like that. We were going to have to slip away in the night if we wanted to build any sort of normal life for ourselves and the children. We were going to have to accept that, like it or not, my stepfather had succeeded in driving us away from our home and our friends.

But how do you choose where to live when you can go virtually anywhere? And how would we find a house we could afford? It was bound to take a few weeks to arrange. The one stipulation was that Steve needed to be within about three-quarters of an hour’s drive of his work, but that covered a huge area. The only places I didn’t want to go were anywhere that I’d been to with my stepdad, like the DIY stores he was always taking me to in other towns. I didn’t want to go anywhere where there was the slightest chance I might bump into him when I was out shopping.

So we were aiming to find a place that I’d never heard of and where you could get the cheapest houses possible, since Steve wasn’t earning all that much. I had actually been in council housing long enough to qualify for help with buying a property and could have got £14,000, which would have helped Steve a lot, but we couldn’t take the risk of anyone in the council knowing where we’d gone. We needed to disappear completely, so we had to sort the house out on our own.

Buying your first property is a big enough step for any young couple without having to do it under this sort of pressure. Every delay at the solicitor’s or the estate agent’s sent us into a whirl of panic. They must have thought they were dealing with mad people. They all kept trying to reassure us that they bought and sold properties for people all the time and knew what they were doing, and we kept trying to convince them that they had no idea how important it was that the transaction went through quickly.

One of the estate agents we went to took us to a place that was on the market for less than £50,000. It was a repossession and the people who’d lost it had taken their revenge by trashing the place before they left, even down to smearing the walls with excrement. It was grim, but at least it would be a home of our own once we’d managed to clean it up. I was used to cleaning places up anyway – the flat the council had given me when I first managed to get away from home had been in an even worse state – and we were grateful to get anything. I also knew a lot about doing places up, having watched my stepdad do it so many times, and about keeping them nice, having been his domestic slave for so many years. Steve’s dad, being a painter and decorator, promised to help us to make the place habitable.

When the deal was finally done and we had the keys to our new home, we had to move in the middle of the night to be sure Richard wouldn’t turn up halfway through and create a scene. Even though we didn’t have much stuff it was still going to take an hour or two to get everything into the van and we couldn’t risk someone seeing us and ringing him. I’d already given a lot of things away to friends and neighbours, telling them that I was buying new and didn’t need any of it any more. I especially didn’t want to take anything to do with Richard, anything he’d sold me or even touched, particularly the bed, which held so many terrible memories. I’d even given away the carpets, since all the flats in the block were the same size and shape. For the final few days before the move I’d been sitting on bare boards in garden chairs, praying Richard wouldn’t turn up and see what I was up to.

Steve’s dad and some of his friends came round at midnight to help and even though we tried to be quiet, the activity brought the neighbours out, lights flickering on all over the block and people asking why we hadn’t told them we were going. I couldn’t give them any explanation, which was hard, as some of them had been very friendly to us in the past. I was just frantic to get away before Richard turned up to stop us, stuffing everything into the van and fielding the questions of curious, offended neighbours with helpless shrugs. Emma had already gone to stay with Steve’s mum. We were going to spend the rest of the night at their house before going on to our new home at first light.

The following morning we set out early in the van, taking Emma with us. Steve’s dad came too, to help with the moving in. It felt good to be finally leaving the area, even if it did mean moving into a house that smelled so bad we all had to eat outside in the garden for the first few days. We spent every waking hour scrubbing and scraping, but finally the place was habitable.

It must have taken a fantastic amount of courage for Steve to decide to move to an area he didn’t know, cutting himself off from many of his friends and relatives in order to give me and Emma a safe home and taking on the whole financial burden.

On top of all that he had to deal with my fragile state of mind. On the one hand I was relieved to finally be away from my family, but at the same time I was still looking over my shoulder the whole time, expecting Silly Git to turn up at any moment. Every time the phone rang I was sure he had tracked down my number. Every time I saw a Cortina my blood would freeze and the familiar sense of panic would rise inside me. I had a small child to care for and a pregnancy to deal with, at the same time as trying to hang on to my sanity. I can’t have been easy to live with.

Although it was an enormous relief to be free from Richard, I missed my brothers and my friends. I felt as if I had abandoned the boys and wanted them to know that I still loved them and that it wasn’t them I was hiding from. A few days after going I rang their headmistress and explained a bit about what had happened.

‘I just want to talk to them,’ I said, ‘so I can tell them that I haven’t forgotten them. Can you ask them to come to your office after school and I’ll ring at three-thirty. Please don’t tell them why you want to see them.’

She was very understanding and said she would do what she could. I waited by the phone until the exact moment that I’d said I would call and then dialled with trembling fingers.

‘I’m so sorry, Jane,’ the headmistress said, ‘because you asked me not to tell them why I wanted them in the office they assumed they were in trouble and ran off the moment school finished.’

I felt so sad not to be able to communicate with my brothers. I found myself thinking about them a lot and wondering how they were coping. When it was their birthdays I would buy cards for them, although I never sent them, and thought about them all day. I used to plan how we might be able to get hold of Tom, who seemed to be the most vulnerable one, and bring him to live in safety with us. Steve was quite happy to go along with the plan, but we never worked out how to do it.

Although I was now physically free of Richard, I was still suffering mentally from everything that had happened before, as well as from the ever-present fear that he would track me down and turn up on the doorstep. Sometimes I would resort to drink to try to fight the depression, picking up a couple of bottles of wine after dropping Emma at school in the morning, or I would just stay inside the house for months on end, terrified to step outside.

If you have been a slave all your life, used to being ordered about and abused from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep, it’s impossible to adjust to normal life overnight. I had never been free to make my own decisions before and had no idea how to do it. I was like a bird that has been bred in captivity suddenly being released into the wild: I fell apart.

When other people were around I could keep up the pretence of being a carefree, zany person, but I knew I was close to the edge and needed to talk to someone professionally. I kept telling my doctor that I needed help, but she didn’t seem to see any urgency in the situation. As far as she was concerned, I was someone who had arrived from nowhere and seemed to be coping. She had no idea of my history and there was never enough time for me to be able to explain fully what I’d been through.

‘I’m alright at the moment,’ I kept saying, ‘but I know I need to sort my head out or it’ll all blow up later. I’ve seen too many people who have fallen to pieces because they haven’t dealt with their problems early.’

My doctor just looked puzzled and referred me to a counsellor.

I made an appointment with the woman, but I said I would have to bring Emma along because I couldn’t get her looked after at that time.

‘Oh that’s fine,’ the counsellor assured me. ‘This meeting is just to get the formalities out of the way and get the names and family tree straight.’

She was a nurse who had just finished a counselling course. When I started telling her what had been happening, her jaw dropped and she looked at Emma.

‘So d’you think he could be her dad then?’ she asked.

That was the end of the session for me. I didn’t feel confident that she knew what she was doing.