I Won't Forgive What You Did (16 page)

It was my mother, however, who found me a job. A start in a local hairdressers who were looking for an apprentice. I was so painfully shy that I couldn’t think of a single thing to say to the customers.

After two weeks at the hairdressers I got my first wage packet and brought it home. It was only £3.50 – an apprentice’s pay – so my mother decided that my keep should be set at £1.50 a week.

My father went berserk at this, jumping up from his armchair and rounding on her, as if she’d committed some heinous crime.

‘I’ve been fucking well keeping her for years!’ he started shouting. ‘And I’m not fucking doing it any longer! I’m not fucking keeping her’ – he jabbed a finger in my direction – ‘while she fucks around doing fucking hairdressing, earning next to nothing – she can do a proper fucking job like everyone else. In full-time service I was, when I was fourteen – fourteen! – let alone her fucking age! And her fucking brother too – fucking staying on at school, when he should be fucking out working! I’m fucked if I know,’ he finished, while my mother stood there looking completely defeated. ‘What is the
fucking
world coming to?’

I made a decision that day, about my father. My father who resented me so much. Who seemed to feel anger at my very existence. I’d stood there and listened to him ranting at my mother, about me – not
to
me, just
about
me, as ever – and I decided if there was one thing I was set on, it would be to never want or have anything from him
ever
again.

I left the hairdressers the next day, and went to work in an electronics factory. At least I’d earn a ‘proper’ wage, as he put it, pay my keep, and become independent. My determination, however, was short-lived. It took me only till lunchtime to realize that I could not spend my entire life putting screws into plugs.

The reality hit on the way home. I’d no proper job, no money and no boyfriend. I hated my father. Hated that his terrifying outbursts were becoming more and more frequent, and now creeping beyond the miserable four walls of our house, to neighbours, to Nan, to anyone, really, who dared get in his way. I hated being part of my so-called ‘family’ more than I could ever find words for.

I was still seeing the psychiatrist, not because I trusted him, or found it helpful, but simply because it’d been part of being allowed to go home after my overdose. But now I decided I’d stop. Why not? It’d been two and a half years after all. What could they do to me if I didn’t turn up?

And so I drifted. I babysat for neighbours, and I did cleaning work in an old people’s home, and I had just about enough money; enough, at least, to allow me to go out at the weekends with Ellie, to dance and meet boys, and try to forget about the mess I was in. I rushed from man to man, never allowing myself to think about why, because it was just too overwhelming.
Everything
about my life felt too overwhelming, and all I could do, in my head at least, was to keep running from it, as fast as I could.

That I was in a downward spiral was clear. Except it was difficult to conceive of any aspect of my life that could be any worse. That it could even be
different
felt like a ridiculous dream. But it was about to become different in almost
every
way. From the moment, in
Flames
, when I met Joe.

It wasn’t that I liked Joe. Not initially. It was a Saturday night in June 1971, and I was at the disco, with Ellie. The DJ was playing ‘Brown Sugar’ by The Rolling Stones, which I’d later find out Joe loved as well; we’d often sing along to it together.

But I wasn’t really concentrating on the music. Also at the disco was a girl I knew slightly, who was apparently engaged to a boy I knew better; I’d gone out with him several times and also had sex with him, not knowing he even
had
a girlfriend, let alone that she was his fiancée. Yet she was, and she was scary, and was out to get me. She was there with another girl, and both were trying to corner me, and I was frightened and didn’t know what to do.

I was just trying to work out a plan, when I saw Joe standing at the bar. I recognized him, having seen him at the disco before, and decided to go up and chat to him. I had no particular interest in getting to know him better but if I was with someone, they couldn’t hurt me, and it would also show them I wasn’t interested in her fiancé.

He was tanned, and had shoulder-length, dark, untidy hair, and dressed scruffily in jeans, boots, and an open-necked shirt, which I still remember today as being turquoise. He was leaning against the bar and he watched me approach.

‘Hi,’ I said, acting a lot bolder than I felt, leaning in so he could hear me above the music. There was a strange sweetish smell that seemed to cling to him.

‘Hello,’ he replied, smiling.

‘Hi!’ I shouted a second time. ‘I think I know you, don’t I? I’m sure we’ve spoken, but I can’t remember your name.’

We hadn’t spoken at all, as he probably knew, but he smiled again and said, ‘Joe. D’you wanna dance?’

I nodded, he downed his pint and we walked to the dance floor, where we bobbed around, and he shouted conversation at me, none of which I could make out. It didn’t matter. I just nodded and smiled where appropriate, glad to feel protected from the furious fiancée.

By the end of the evening, I still wasn’t sure if I liked him, but he certainly seemed to like me. He had his friend drive me home in his flash E-Type Jaguar, and I could tell he’d arranged it to impress me. It didn’t – the car, though big on the outside, was really cramped on the inside and, as it was a two-seater, I spent the journey crammed on Joe’s lap, bent double as the roof was so low.

But there was something about Joe that made him different. He wasn’t pushy, or forward, and genuinely seemed to like just being with me. He often commented I was too good for him; was even humble, which was something entirely new. And because I, in contrast, wasn’t sure about my feelings, there was no pressure, no sense of urgency. We just drifted together and he was happy to be patient, in the hopes that I’d come to feel as he did. Sex with Joe would come later and would come naturally. Joe, in fact, would become the only man in my life I would ever enjoy sex with.

He was eighteen and, for all his gentleness around me, Joe was as uncouth as my father. He swore all the time, and seemed to speak to anyone and everyone without a care in the world about how he came across. This made him slightly frightening to be around, as there was always this potential for something to flare up and, on more than one occasion, it did. It was as if he was perpetually ready to take issue with the world – not aggressively, particularly, just entirely without concern for how others perceived him. He also had a side to him that disturbed me. One day, in a garden centre (where he used to steal stuff to sell) he pulled down his jeans, squatted, and did a poo in a large flowerpot, then, laughing, stood up and walked on.

He worked as a bricklayer’s labourer, though as that job was dependent on the weather he also made money by other means, one of them being his regular small-hours outings, with his brother-in-law, to a neighbouring farmer’s field. Here they’d dig up and fill sacks with potatoes, carrots and whatever vegetables were in season, which they’d sell to the neighbours the next day.

Yet despite all this, there was something I liked about Joe. He was good-looking (and never short of female attention) and seemed afraid of nothing and no one. Most importantly, though, was that he was never, ever mean to me. He was kind to me, accepted me exactly as I was, and never asked anything of me. Plus we’d talk about anything and everything. And though I didn’t fancy him at first, I did enjoy the frisson of the danger I felt when in his company – never towards me, just the aura of it. But most important was that, with Joe, I was part of a couple, which meant I wasn’t so alone.

By the time I’d been seeing Joe for a few weeks, life at home had become unbearable. I still hadn’t found a proper job, and my father would constantly shout and swear at my mother about it. It was after I had recounted one such heated exchange between my parents about me that Joe suggested I go and live with him.

I jumped at the chance to escape. It was in the autumn – three months before my seventeenth birthday, and terribly young to be leaving home. But not having a family, in the sense of a loving, caring family, I felt I had nothing to stay for. It wasn’t what I wanted, exactly, because I did feel so young, but though I was sad, I felt I had no option. I knew my father would be pleased to see me gone.

It soon became clear Joe’s family was as dysfunctional as mine. His birth father lived some miles away, having won lots of money on the pools. After buying a swimming pool and some fast cars, he’d left Joe’s mother for a much younger girl. He now had a new family of four sad little children, who were bullied by him, just as Joe had been. I used to visit them with Joe, and would see his violence in action. He was a terrible, truly scary man.

But it wasn’t just violence that crippled Joe’s family. Almost all of them – his mother, father, stepfather (his mother’s new husband) and siblings all included – seemed to be drunk all the time. Every weekend was spent in an alcoholic haze and weekday evenings, providing anyone had any money, were no different. Christmas Day 1971, for example, saw us all sitting round a table not groaning under the weight of a turkey, but instead under the weight of all the bottles of booze that served as the family’s festive lunch. No one seemed remotely bothered about food.

Being sober in the midst of this was strange and unsettling, and the world they’d created completely alien. I thought I’d escaped a house that couldn’t be worse yet, in some respects – particularly in material terms – this
was
worse. They lived like people half a century before – surviving on scraps, like characters out of a Dickens novel. Their home, an old unmodernized council property, was barren – real bottom of the barrel stuff – and the life Joe’s father lived could not have been a greater contrast. They survived with only the basics in terms of food, furniture, clothing and money, and the house was freezing all the time. I shared Joe’s little bedroom – dark purple walls and carpet – and we slept together in his broken single bed.

Joe’s older sister was severely epileptic and had fits all the time. She would eventually get married and have no further contact with her family, but back then her fits were frequent and scary. Despite this, and the pressing need for fuel and food, the whole family, whenever any money was in evidence, would sit for hours round the table, playing cards for money. I found the way they behaved towards one another when doing this very upsetting. Often, there’d be a whole week’s wages at stake, yet one sibling seemed to have no compunction about winning and pocketing the lot, leaving the loser with nothing. Consequently, there was often – quite literally – nothing to eat, especially when it got close to the end of the week and Joe’s mother had spent what little she did have buying ridiculously expensive freeze-dried Vesta meals – curries and risottos and the like – on the Friday before, when she got paid. She seemed a gambler through and through. If she lost most of what she had – to her husband, or a son – she’d invariably invest what little remained playing cards again, in the belief she could win it back.

But for all the privations – and the fact that I felt as out of place here as I’d felt unloved at home – it was calmer at Joe’s house because nobody shouted, and apart from their strange attitude towards the pooling of money, they all seemed to genuinely get on. Joe’s mother, in particular, for all her drink problems, was kind to me, always, and treated me as if I was a part of her family, and made me feel valued and welcome.

Apart from a brief stint in a posh boutique (where I was tongue-tied and hopeless), I still hadn’t found any permanent work. But Joe, with his labouring and stealing veg and so on, was happy and able to support me. I mostly stayed at home, helping his mother with the shopping and housework. I was also a teenager, and here I could sleep like one.

It felt embarrassing to be sleeping with Joe in his parents’ house – my father would never have allowed it – and even more so to sometimes get up and find it was lunchtime; something that would not have happened at my house in a million years – all the shouting and swearing would see to that. We lived life at a very leisurely pace, going to the local working men’s club, or the pub, at the weekend and most nights staying in watching TV with the family, Joe and I curled up together in one armchair.

It felt so strange living this way – but I did feel comfortable around Joe, who’d look after me, turning on the water heater for me, running me a bath, and often buying me chocolates and flowers.

But the tentacles of what I’d eventually realize was my mother’s illness were reaching out, desperate to pull me back.

One day, early in 1972, my father turned up at Joe’s house, demanding I return home. This was not about Joe – my parents knew almost nothing about him – but the fact that while I was with him (their home was quite a way away) I couldn’t be at my own house, caring for my mother, and she was becoming ever more agitated.

At seventeen, I had enough insight to understand what was happening, and why such pressure was being applied – as our mother–child roles had been reversed for most of my life. She had never mothered me. Hadn’t ever cuddled me, sung or read to me, told me she loved me, kissed me better, made me feel cherished. Most importantly, though I still didn’t understand it as such, neither had she protected me from the men who sexually abused me – indeed she reared me to believe I hadn’t even
been
abused. She passed no comment – bar laughter – about Pops’ constant manhandling of me, and at no point did she ever seem concerned in the least that Daniel would take me off on our ‘walks’ much less express interest in why or what we’d done. It was simply not discussed, and nor would it ever be. How else could I process what had been done to me, therefore, as anything but normal and right? Even so – and I now know how profoundly she has damaged me – I felt a huge responsibility for her. I didn’t know she was ill, not really. Just that she needed me, and it was my duty to go home and look after her. She was apparently becoming ill with the worry of my not being there, at her side.