The Step Child (19 page)

Strangely, it stopped as abruptly as it had started. My brothers still went for haircuts. I still followed them there. But that chapter was over. The Barber was just a normal man again and I was still a bad girl – I was learning.

When I was visited by the police as an adult and told that they were collecting evidence to see whether a case could be brought against Helen, I had very little time in which to give my statement in terms of all the things which had happened in my past. How could I remember it all at once? How could I get it all down into one statement? But the police needed me to give them something. And I did. But the statement they took to the Procurator Fiscal was only a tiny portion of what really went on. By the time I went to court I had remembered so much more. So very, very much more. One of my memories was this one – the Barber. I stood up in the witness box and I told them all about that man. I sat there as lawyers discussed whether it could be included, whether that part of my horror was ‘relevant’, and I felt as if it was all happening again. I wouldn’t be believed, I would have been better to keep quiet as he had warned me. When they came back and told me that it was allowed, it was to be included, I was shocked – someone was finally listening, even if it was decades too late. I was never told whether he was dead or alive, whether he was investigated or not (some things never change). His shop is no longer there but I can see his face clear as day even as I write this.

THE PARTIES WENT ON
, the horror continued. By now, I knew I was worthless. I knew I was ugly and I knew what being a bastard meant. I also suspected that I was very, very bad indeed. If I wasn’t bad, then why was I always being punished? As more and more nameless men abused me, I was starting to face up to something – I meant nothing, I counted for nothing. Everything I thought about myself came from Helen. She made it clear that everything was my fault – I brought it all on myself. I had it all coming to me, in her words.

What happened to me during those years still remains with me – but not always in obvious ways. I don’t think anyone could know whether those who have endured child sexual abuse can ever be truly free – psychologically – of their experiences. However, I do know that the physical repercussions of my time with Helen Ford live with me to this day.

I would never dare mention I was ill when I was a child. It wasn’t just a sign of weakness; it was a sign of indulgence. Only special people could get ill, because only special people deserved the attention needed to make them better again.
And I, most certainly, was not in that category. I learned the hard way.

One day in Edina Place, when I was about 10 years old, I was on bathroom punishment as usual. But today felt different. I was cold, as always, but was also just as hot. I was shifting so quickly from one extreme to the other that I was confused. One minute I was freezing, shaking and shivering; the next I was burning up, feeling sick and faint. It was during school holidays and I had been there since just after breakfast – other people’s breakfast, not mine – and it was now late afternoon. My throat felt as though there was something stuck in it. It was agony – so bad that I knew I needed to risk Helen’s anger by telling her something was wrong. I couldn’t shout as my throat was too sore, and I realised that I needed to leave the bathroom to let my stepmother know there was something the matter with me. Time was passing. As I stood there, alone, feverish, I could feel myself sway. I just wanted to lie down, but knew that this wasn’t allowed. Eventually, I knew I would have to bite the bullet and ask. Ask for help. Ask for permission to go to bed. Shakily, I turned round and took a few faltering steps towards the bathroom door.

I knew that Helen was in the kitchen because I could hear her. I walked, staggered, across the floor, feeling so ill that I was willing to risk challenging her by leaving the bathroom. I stood behind her at the kitchen sink. ‘Helen,’ I whispered. She whirled round with a dishcloth still in her hand. ‘Jesus Christ! What are you doing there, you sneaky little bitch? Crawling up on people when they don’t know it.’ Her face came closer to mine. ‘Defying me. Laughing in my face.’ I was nowhere near laughing. I felt as if I could fall down any second.

‘Please Helen,’ I began. ‘I feel really bad.’

‘So you should! I’ll give you bloody feeling bad. Get back in there now, and don’t you dare come out again.’ She went back to washing the dishes, assuming that I’d leave and go back to the bathroom.

This was important. She had to know I wasn’t making it up. Usually, I’d never stand up to her, but I had to try again. ‘Helen, I really think I need to go to bed. I’m all hot and cold. I think I’m going to pass out.’

She turned back round. ‘Are you still there, shit for brains?’ She walked towards me. When she got up to my face again, she flicked it with the stinking wet dishcloth on the pronouncement of each word. ‘Get.’ Flick. ‘Back.’ Flick. ‘To.’ Flick. ‘The.’ Flick. ‘Fucking.’ Flick. ‘Bathroom.’ Flick.

I stumbled back to my prison. Closed the door. Fell down on my knees to the cold, cold tiles as the sweat lashed over my body. A wave of nausea was flooding over me as a knock came on the door. Had she changed her mind? Was she letting me out?

‘Are you okay, diddums?’ her voice sing-songed. ‘Is precious feeling better now?’

I lifted my throbbing head up.

Why wasn’t she coming in, either to help me or taunt me some more?

‘I’ve been thinking. If you’re so unwell, the best place for you is in quarantine. Stay there until we all go to bed tonight. Keep away from the rest of us. If you’re riddled with something nasty, I don’t want me or Gordon or Andrew to catch it, you filthy little cow.’

Hours passed as I lay there on the tiles, feeling freezing cold one minute and boiling hot the next.

Once more, much later, I plucked up all the courage I had in my scrawny little body. I crawled along the corridor to the room where Helen was. ‘Please, Helen,’ I croaked. ‘Please, help me, I feel awful. Please can I go to my bed? I’ll be good. I’ll be quiet.’ She turned the television off. Stared at me. Then she opened her mouth and bawled as loudly as she could. ‘Get out! Get out of here! You’ve no right to be here! Get back on punishment! Go! Go! Go!’

She made me stand there all evening. Every now and again, as
I drifted in and out of things, I could hear her coming along the corridor, checking up on me. After a while, I realised everyone had gone to bed. My Dad was out, working overtime as usual. And me? I thought, I really thought, that I was going to die. Eventually Helen went to bed too – I heard her come out of the living room and go down the lobby into her bedroom. She didn’t bother to check up on me. She knew that I’d still be in there, still ‘on punishment’. Finally, I couldn’t bear it any more. I staggered out of the bathroom, and sheepishly knocked on her bedroom door. I heard nothing. I knocked again. Still nothing. I opened the door a tiny bit, just a crack. ‘Helen,’ I whispered. ‘Helen, can I please go to bed?’ A whirlwind flew at me, knocking me back. She must have been sitting in there waiting for me to request this most outrageous of privileges. ‘Bed? Bed? You’ve got some brass fucking neck, haven’t you?’ she screamed. I was sweating through my temperature as she started hitting me. She was a mad vision in her slippers and dressing gown, lashing out, knocking me off the wall, slapping my head from one side to another. ‘Ill? I’ll give you bloody ill! You’ll know what ill is when I’ve finished with you!’ I ran back into the bathroom, still pleading for a doctor, and closed the door behind me. She followed me in, absolutely berserk, and continued the beating.

Finally, she seemed to run out of energy and went back to her bedroom. I knew I couldn’t even afford the luxury of slumping to the floor, despite my desperate need to do so. If she came back and caught me slacking off, who could tell what she might be capable of? I stood there as long as I could, but I must have fainted, must have lost consciousness, because I remember coming round on the floor to find her standing over me, yelling: ‘You! Get to your bed, now! And don’t tell your father!’

Next day – actually, probably only some hours later – she came into my boxroom with my Dad. She started fussing around my bed – the pair of them were hardly ever in that room, so it was quite a performance. ‘Look, Don,’ she said, ‘I’m really
worried about the bairn. All last night, I kept telling her something was wrong and she needed to let me get the doctor in – but she’s that bloody stubborn, she wouldn’t hear of it.’ My Dad looked at her as if she were Mother Bloody Teresa. ‘You’re too good, Helen,’ he muttered. ‘The bairns don’t know how much you do for them. Well, it’s time you just put your foot down. If you think she needs a doctor, I don’t care how pigheaded she is about it – she’ll get a doctor.’

So, to the doctor I was taken. Penicillin and rest were prescribed – and Helen made a great show of how tired she was of looking after a sick child; how much easier it would all have been if only I’d got medical attention when she’d first suggested it rather than digging my heels in. Her show was for my Dad, the doctor, the neighbours, anyone who would listen – anyone who would open their ears to her lies, while closing their eyes to the fact that the ill child in front of them couldn’t have fought her way out of a paper bag, was covered from head to toe in bruises, and barely had any skin over her bones.

The illnesses I had while a child, and when Helen was around, had repercussions which lasted a lot longer than if I had been properly fed, cared for, and given treatment when I required it. I had constant tonsillitis until I was 12 – at that age, I had my tonsils removed and spent a week in Astley Ainslie Convalescence Unit recovering. I loved that week, because of the attention and the feeling of safety. The nurses used to let me help them with little bits and pieces, and I felt so secure that I never even noticed the pain.

Tonsillitis was one of the more minor problems of my childhood. Other, more serious, health problems persisted into my adult life. When I was being sexually abused, I was always sore ‘down below’ and had terrible problems with my ‘waterworks’
(how strange that, despite the awful things being done to me, I was never allowed to use ‘dirty’ – that is, proper – words for bodily parts and functions). The fact that I was unable to go to the toilet when I needed to didn’t help the situation at all. For as far back as I can remember, from the day of arriving at Easter Road right up to the present, I have had issues with my ‘waterworks’. As a child, I wet the bed, and this became a major issue for Helen. I couldn’t help it; I was five years old! I’d just come out of care, I wet the bed and, for some reason, she thought this was the end of the world. She got more and more annoyed about it until eventually she started to rub my nose in the sheets in the morning, make me take my wet pants off, rub my face with them, make me put them back on and wear them. It’s no surprise that at school I was called pissy pants.

Another one of her remedies for my bed-wetting was to make me strip the bed down to the rubber sheet. I hated that rusty red sheet, stinking of rubber and pee. I’d have to scrub the rubber sheet in the bath, trample the sheets, then wring them before hanging them out to dry in the back green or, if it was raining, on the pulley. As I got older, I would get more and more embarrassed about going to school stinking of piss. I would run to the girls’ toilets where I would try to clean myself with the powdery borax soap and dry myself with hard, green paper towels. I even got to the stage of washing my knickers then putting them back on wet. Nothing helped – either with the smell or with my problems with ‘normal’ toilet behaviour.