I Remember, Daddy (8 page)

Although my parents had always done a lot of socialising and my mother had occasionally come home from a dinner or a party slightly tipsy, she’d never been a heavy drinker like my father. After we moved into the flat, though, she began to drink much more, and she’d often farm me out to stay with other people. I’d sometimes spend weeks at friends’ houses, sharing the normal lives they lived with fathers who were kind and reasonable and didn’t fly into rages and beat them or their mothers and who didn’t creep into their bedrooms at night or prostitute them out to their friends.

Those were the best weeks of my life at that time, although, in some ways, they came too late, because the seeds of my own depression had already been sown and I think my mind had already begun to block out the worst and most distressing of my childhood memories – the unravelling of which after my son was born was to make me so ill that it came close to destroying me.

My mother would often rant and rave about my father, particularly when she’d had too much to drink. But she’d still let him in whenever he came to the flat, and I’d be sent out on some stupid errand and told not to come back for two hours. I knew what they were doing – or, at least, that they were doing ‘it’. And when I got back to the flat, after wandering miserably around streets that no reasonable adult would take a child to at all, my father would have gone and my mother would be giggly and girlish for a while, before sinking once again into a state of listless crying.

One evening, before the work in the house had been completed and my mother and I were still the only tenants, there was a knock at the front door of the flat and I opened it to find my father standing there, one hand resting on the door jamb. He was drunk, although apparently not yet at the aggressive stage of drunkenness, and he pushed me aside as he walked into the hallway and said, ‘Where’s your mother?’

‘She’s in there,’ I told him, pointing towards the living room. Then I went back into my bedroom and closed the door.

The walls of the flat were made of flimsy plaster-board, and I could hear the murmur of my parents’ voices, although I couldn’t make out what they were saying. And then I heard my father shout, ‘You will bloody sign it, woman. Just do it.’

‘But it’s my house. It’s the only thing I’ve got left,’ my mother said, in the whining voice that had always irritated my father.

The palms of my hands began to sweat.

‘Sign it!’ my father screamed.

I heard a thud and then my mother shouted, ‘Help, Katie! Get the police.’

It was in the days before everyone had mobile phones, and there was no telephone in the flat. It was dark outside and the nearest call-box was several streets away. I was nervous about walking through our neigh-bourhood in broad daylight, and I never left the flat on my own at night. But I knew that on this occasion there was no alternative and that I had to go.

I tried not to make a sound as I eased open my bedroom door. But I’d taken just one step into the hallway when my father burst out of the living room and bellowed at me, ‘If you go, she’ll be dead when you get back.’

I just stood there, paralysed by fear and indecision, and then my father reached out his hand, grabbed me by the hair and dragged me into the living room.

‘Just sit there and watch,’ he shouted, pushing me towards a corner of the room and forcing me down until I was crouching on the rough floorboards.

He turned towards my mother, who curled up on the sofa with her arms over her head as she tried to protect herself against the punches and kicks he rained down on her from above.

On the many occasions while they were married when my father had attacked my mother, he’d always been careful to avoid marking her face, or any other part of her body where the bruises would be visible. This time, however, he didn’t seem to care, and blood was already pouring out of her nose and from a huge gash above her eye.

I sat on the floor where my father had thrown me, hugging my knees against my chest and whimpering. I’d always been afraid that one day he’d go too far and I was certain that, this time, my mother was going to die. A voice in my head kept repeating the words my father had so often shouted at me – ‘You’re useless. You’re nothing but a worthless piece of shit’ – and I hated myself for not having the courage to make a dash for the door and then run out into the street and try to get help. But, quite apart from the fact that I was so frightened I didn’t think I could force myself to move at all, I knew that if I did stand up, my father would simply kill me too.

Suddenly, he reached out his hand towards the little table by the sofa, snatched up a heavy glass ashtray and brought it crashing down on my mother’s head. I started to scream hysterically as blood spattered across the sofa and on to the wall behind it and my mother’s limp body fell back against the cushions. I was still screaming when my father yanked me by the arms, pulling me roughly to my feet, and shouted into my face, ‘Stop that bloody noise and come with me.’

He dragged me down the hallway and into the bathroom, where he turned on the taps and began to run water into the cracked washbasin, leaving a trail of blood over everything he touched.

‘Wash them,’ he told me, lowering his stained, blood-soaked hands into the water. And I obeyed him, because, unable to process the horror of having witnessed my own mother die at the hands of my father, my mind had shut down and I was no longer capable of thinking at all.

My father dried his hands on the thin blue towel that hung on a half-attached rail beside the shower, and then he pushed me ahead of him back into the living room.

I didn’t want to see my mother’s body, but I knew I couldn’t just pretend that nothing had happened. So I shut my eyes, took a deep breath and then opened them again and looked quickly towards the sofa. My mother’s head was resting at an unnatural angle against a cushion and the top half of her body was soaked in blood. I began to sob.

‘For Christ’s sake, shut up,’ my father hissed, pushing past me as he walked towards the sofa and then leaned down to pull my mother up by the arms into a sitting position. As he moved her, a thin, barely audible moaning sound escaped from her lips and then her eyes flicked open and she reached up her hand to touch her head.

I wanted to throw my arms around her and hug her, but I was too afraid to move. Instead, I stood completely still and watched as her eyelids closed again and she slumped back against the arm of the sofa. Again, my father pulled her up, more roughly this time, and propped her into a sitting position with some of the blood-stained cushions from the sofa. Then he turned, straightened a piece of paper on the little table, took a pen from the inside pocket of his jacket, unscrewed its cap and put it into my mother’s hand, folding his fingers tightly around hers as he said, ‘Now! Sign it.’

Still slipping in and out of consciousness, my mother signed over to my father her one remaining possession – the house by the coast, which he planned to sell so that he could pay off some of his gambling debts. Then he put the lid back on his pen, placed the pen carefully in his pocket, blew briefly on my mother’s wet signature, folded the paper and left, without a backward glance.

As the door of the flat slammed shut behind my father, my mother sank back on to the sofa and appeared to stop breathing.

‘Don’t die, Mummy,’ I pleaded in a whisper, standing beside her but not daring to touch her thin, fragile, blood-drenched body. ‘Please, Mummy. Please don’t die.’

She moved her lips, but no sound came out of them and I bent down towards her so that I could put my ear close to her mouth.

‘Get Eileen,’ she murmured.

Eileen was a friend of my mother’s, a sensible, down-to-earth woman who never allowed her emotions to overrule her commonsense. I felt almost sick with relief at the thought that Eileen would know exactly what to do. And this time I did find the courage to run out into the dark streets to the phone box.

When Eileen arrived, she’d already phoned for an ambulance and my mother was taken to hospital, where incredulous doctors shrugged resignedly as she insisted she’d fallen and banged her head.

Even after my father had come so close to killing her, he’d still occasionally turn up at the flat and my mother would let him in. Sometimes, he’d search every room, looking for any signs that a man had been staying there. I never understood why my mother put up with it, but they had very complicated feelings about each other. Although they appeared to hate each other – with good reason on my mother’s part – each of them was jealous at the thought that the other one might have other relationships, even though my father was with Sally at the time. My father had nothing to be jealous of, though, because my mother had no man in her life. So they kept doing what she called ‘getting back together’, although it rarely lasted longer than one night, at most, and on my father’s side it had nothing to do with anything other than sex and control.

I’d sometimes visit my father and stay overnight with him. I didn’t want to see him at all, but he told my mother that, if necessary, he’d get a court order to enforce regular ‘visitation rights’. So she told me that it would be better if I went of my own accord, because that way I wouldn’t have to go every week.

Sometimes when I went to see my father, Sally would be there. But they often had huge rows, which resulted in her slamming out of the house and staying away for a few days, and then I’d have to sleep in his bed with him. He was drinking very heavily at that time, as well as taking cocaine, and he was still throwing extravagant parties, at which he sometimes made me dance for his friends.

However, the real focus of the parties was sex. Most of the women who went to them were young – some of them only in their mid-teens – and a lot of them were working prostitutes. The men were almost all highly paid, well-respected professional men who were friends and colleagues of my father. Some of them were well known, either locally or, in some cases, nationally, and most of them would have had a great deal to lose if people had been aware of how they spent their leisure time. The only people who did know about it, though, were the girls – who were well paid to keep their mouths shut – and other men who were doing the same thing. So they all felt safe in the knowledge that no one was going to dish the dirt on them.

For many of them – including my father – the power that came with their professional positions had made them arrogant and they believed that they were beyond and above the law. If nemesis ever threatened my father, however, he knew that all he had to do was let it be known that he had in his possession some very interesting and explicit photographs of people who might not want their private lives to be made public.

In some ways, my life didn’t really improve after my mother left my father. Although for most of the time I was free of his bullying cruelty and the terrible anxiety that resulted from living every day under his tyrannical control, I still had to visit him and sleep in his bed when Sally wasn’t there. And, on the nights when I stayed with him, I was still lifted out of my bed in my sleep and placed in a bed beside his friends. Sometimes, they touched me and sometimes they had sex with someone else while I lay there miserably, my eyes tightly shut as I tried to imagine I was anywhere in the world except where I really was. Sometimes, I’d see a flash and – as I got a bit older and began to understand what was happening – I’d feel deeply ashamed at the thought that my humiliating degradation had been immortalised in a photograph.

From being a bit of a misfit at the age of seven, when my mother left my father, I became over the next couple of years a very odd little girl indeed.

For as long as I could remember, I’d had all sorts of obsessions – things like ‘If I don’t reach that lamppost before that car gets to the zebra crossing, something terrible is going to happen to me.’ And I only ate when I was forced to; by the time I was ten, I weighed less than 4 stone. I realise now that it was a form of self-harming, but at the time no one seemed to wonder why I was trying to starve myself to death. Perhaps my mother just assumed it was because I’d spent the first seven years of my life being bullied, both physically and mentally, by a cruel, aggressive father. She did take me to the doctor, though, when I was on the verge of becoming anorexic, and he gave me some disgusting green, gloopy stuff to drink every day. It was supposed to make me hungry and to provide me with some calories and nutrition. But it tasted so revolting that drinking it seemed like a punishment in itself.

Despite everything, though, I did have friends at school, although I never really trusted anyone and I felt as though no one knew the real me. But I wasn’t a nice little girl.

I was afraid that if I allowed anyone to get close to me, they’d discover I was an imposter, because I was really a horrible, useless person, just like my father always said I was, who was tainted in some way I didn’t understand. And because there was no one I could talk to about my thoughts and fears, I created some imaginary friends – Clarence Groon and his wife, also called Clarence Groon, and their Clarence Groon babies.

The Clarence Groons were balls of fluff, which I’d hold up against my face in my cupped hands while I whispered to them about all the things I could never have told anyone else. In fact, they were imaginary balls of fluff – my cupped hands were empty – and I think my mother was a bit spooked by it all.

She used to ask me repeatedly why I was always talking to them and what I was saying. Oddly, though, I think she was more impatient with me than concerned about why I might need to have imaginary friends to talk to – particularly, perhaps, such peculiar, non-living ones. In my mind, though, the Clarence Groons were real friends I could trust, and I told them everything, including my darkest, bleakest thoughts.

I used to fantasise about my death, even at that young age, and I’d often do mad, sometimes dangerous, things. For example, one day when I was out with a friend, I jumped, fully clothed, off the high bank beside a waterfall, hurling myself into the cascading, foaming water and falling with it into the pool below. My friend was frantic. I could hear her screams as I jumped, and when she came running and stumbling down the rocks to the pool, I think she expected to find me lying there dead. By the time she reached me, however, I was climbing out of the water, bruised but otherwise not seriously hurt, although, even so, she was so shocked that she never really forgave me. She was convinced that I was crazy – and perhaps she was right.