Mummy Knew (12 page)

That’s why I would always agree to stay at home if Dad suggested it. I had learned the hard way that to reject his friendship meant paying a huge price. I was conditioned to put a happy grin on my face to mask the sinking feeling inside. I tried to look at the bright side. At least I got to eat plenty of sweets. Dad would hand me a pound note and send me round the corner to Izzie’s mouldy-smelling shop where the floor space was no more than five square feet of tattered lino. I would ask Izzie for forty fruit salads, forty blackjacks and forty toffee logs, just as Dad had instructed. Izzie would lumber off to the back shelf trailing ash from her king-size cigarette as she went. Then I’d watch and listen to the people in the queue tutting behind me as she counted out the sweets into a white paper bag with her fat arthritic fingers.

When I got back home, Dad would have queued up the programme we were going to watch on the new video recorder he had bought primarily to tape his race meetings. Then we’d settle down on the sofa together and Dad would divide the sweets, half each. He would lie down, head propped up with pillows, and I would sit in my usual place, pinned under his legs. It was the only place I was allowed to sit when we watched TV together because he liked me to stroke his bare feet. If I dared to sit in another chair or simply wanted to go up to my bedroom like any other kid, he would take umbrage and dish out punishment as he saw fit. Every time I stopped to unwrap a blackjack, he’d wiggle his foot urgently, and I’d have to rush to start stroking again, touching all his horrible cracked hard skin. The revolting cheesy smell coupled with his long yellow toenails made me feel sick. My
arm used to ache because I had to keep it raised and moving for hours on end, but it was a small price to pay to keep Dad happy. Occasionally he’d give a little groan of pleasure and say, ‘Yeah, do it like that,’ and I’d be so pleased to make him happy. When he was happy he wasn’t angry or violent, so I made sure to stroke him as best I could.

‘You’ve got the lightest touch in the world,’ he’d say, just as he used to when I washed his back when I was little, and I’d swell with pride.

Dad used to like
Columbo
and
Quincy
, but occasionally when he was being nice we watched
Little House on the Prairie
, which was my favourite. I’d often have tears streaming down my face by the end. Invariably Pa Ingalls would have shown what an amazing dad he was, and his little Laura with the red plaits would have learned an important lesson, one that filled her father with pride and caused him to well up with emotion. I felt curiously sad, and didn’t fully understand it, except to wish I had a dad as nice and kind as Pa Ingalls.

Dad would laugh to see my tears, and usually he would open his legs and pull me up to lie on top of him on the sofa. I’d lay my head against his chest as he rocked me from side to side. Then I’d cry all the more, and wish he could be loving like this all the time. Sometimes as I lay there I would feel something hard sticking into my stomach. I wondered if it was his penis going hard like it used to back at the flat in Peckham when he used to touch himself in front of me. We’d recently had sex education lessons at school, so I knew what it meant now, and this made me feel guilty and dirty for suspecting such a thing about my own dad. I realised I must be
mistaken, but much as I wanted to, I didn’t dare pull away in case he guessed what I had been thinking.

When Mum wasn’t at work, it was very rare for us all to sit together in one room and watch television. In the evenings, Mum and Kat would sit downstairs in the dining room to watch telly while Dad and I would be in the front room upstairs watching the very same programme. I can’t remember why we got into this habit, but it soon became the norm and no one commented on it.

Sometimes Kat would come upstairs and want me to play a game with her, but Dad insisted that I continued stroking his feet, and he’d shout at her and tell her to ‘go back downstairs with Mummy’.

Once while Dad went to the toilet, Kat toddled in with her tree-house toy and we started to play a game, just as we did every morning after breakfast. When Dad came back he kicked me hard in the ankle and growled, ‘Who said you could stop doing my feet?’ I leapt back into my position on the sofa, like a well-trained dog, and watched as Kat wandered off back downstairs, crying for Mum.

When I was eleven and Kat was two we both got scarlet fever and our bodies were covered with an itchy red rash. The doctor prescribed medicine and a bottle of calamine lotion to apply to the rash. I went into the bathroom, stripped off my clothes and covered my body the best I could but my back was particularly itchy and there were parts I simply couldn’t reach. I didn’t like to ask Mum but I felt I had no choice so I went into the front room where she sat smoking with Dad.

‘Can you do my back please, Mum?’ I asked, poking my head round the door, wrapped only in a towel.

‘Do I have to?’ she moaned, rolling her eyes up to the ceiling.

‘Come here,’ said Dad from his position on the sofa. ‘I’ll do it.’

Reluctantly I went and stood between his legs and watched as he filled his hand with a pool of the chalky pink lotion. I held my hair up with one hand and clasped the towel to my chest with the other as he smoothed the cooling lotion over my shoulders. Then I felt him tugging the back of the towel, so that he could reach lower. I loosened my grip just a little.

‘Let the dog see the fucking rabbit,’ he laughed, sweeping his hands down to the small of my back and skimming over the top of my buttocks.

I immediately tensed, embarrassed. Mum watched me from the other side of the room with a look of pure loathing on her face. I felt ill and wondered what I had done to upset her so.

‘There you go, all done. I won’t offer to do your fried eggs,’ he said, referring to my chest.

Despite my burning fever, I felt myself blushing and was eager to leave the room. But before I could step away, Dad pulled me down onto his lap, and placed a hand across my brow. I shifted awkwardly, attempting to adjust the towel around me.

‘Cor, she’s burning hot, Donna,’ he said.

‘Yeah, so’s Kat,’ said Mum shortly. ‘Come here, Kat, come sit with Mummy.’

‘Yeah, but you wanna feel her head, poor kid. She’s roasting,’ he said, focussing all his attention on me. ‘I’d better just take her up to bed.’

He stood up with an arm round me to support me and Mum glowered as we left the room.

He led me upstairs and waited outside the bedroom door while I slipped on a nightie and got into bed then he came in and knelt down beside me. As he kissed my hot forehead and held my hand, I began to drift off into a fitful sleep, vaguely aware that Dad had lain down beside me.

For a moment or two I sank into a dream before stirring into consciousness again. That’s when I became aware that Dad had his hand down the front of his trousers and was moving it back and forth vigorously. I could feel it slapping into my own hand, which he held against his groin. My first reaction was of utter shock. What on earth was Dad doing? I knew it was wrong and rude, and I felt guilty that I had woken up and became aware of it. I realised he must think I was fast asleep and that he was doing things to himself in private. It made me feel almost like a Peeping Tom. I clamped my eyes shut and hardly dared to swallow in case he heard and realised I was awake. I knew Dad had a habit of being lewd and crude, but surely even he would be mortified if he knew I was aware of what he was doing to himself. My heart pounded in my ears and it felt like an eternity passed before he released my hand from his sweaty grip, and left the room.

It didn’t even occur to me to talk to Mum about this incident and my increasing feelings of awkwardness around Dad. A lot of the time she could see for herself what was going on
and the most she would do is laugh and say, ‘Oh my Gawd, Frank,’ as if it was all one big joke. She was as uninhibited as Dad when it came to things of a sexual nature. She routinely left a life-like vibrator on her bedside table beside the ashtray, and when Kat was a baby she used to pick it up and use it as a teething ring.

‘Oh my Gawd, give us it, Kat,’ she’d laugh.

Both Mum and Dad were careless or blasé about such things. Once when I had left my shoes in their bedroom, I knocked on the door and asked if I could come in to get them. When I went in, I was excruciatingly embarrassed to find them in the middle of sex. Mum was on her back with him on top, pumping away, and a sheet half covering them. As I stood frozen in the doorway, Dad continued to move back and forth. My face burned with embarrassment, but for the first time I felt a new emotion: I was angry with Mum that she could behave in such a way. I expected nothing else from Dad by now, but she was a mother, and mothers were supposed to protect their children, weren’t they?

It was still routine to see Dad’s penis on display. In summer he’d wear very short white swimming trunks and often his genitals would be hanging out of the side. He’d kick a balloon or ball to me and every time he raised his leg he’d expose himself. Either that or he’d sit with his legs apart blatantly scratching his scrotum, but Mum would never say ‘Put it away, Frank. Everyone can see,’ as a normal mother or wife would do.

It was around this time that he began instigating more and more physical games with me. Wrestling remained a
favourite. He would pin me down with my arms above my head and lie on top of me, forcing my legs apart with his knees. Mum would be in and out of the room with cups of tea or cans of lager for Dad, and she often witnessed him grinding his hips between my open legs but she never said a word.

I was starting to wonder whether he was touching my bum and chest on purpose, but despite his previous lewd behaviour with pornography and nudity, and what he had done to himself in my bedroom when he thought I was asleep, a part of me couldn’t quite believe he meant it in a rude way. He was my dad. We were only playing a wrestling game, and Mum was often in the room. Besides, I’d seen Giant Haystacks grip Big Daddy in a private place on the telly, but there was never any question that he was doing it on purpose, or being rude. Dad was my dad, and although I squirmed with embarrassment when he squeezed my buttocks or chest, I felt bad for having suspicions about his motives.

One day he had my face in a headlock between his thighs. My face was pressed into his groin and I felt the familiar hardness beneath his scruffy jeans. Mum was sitting in the armchair, flicking through the
Reader’s Digest
. I couldn’t breathe and just wanted to get away, so I screamed as loudly as I could. Dad released me quickly and rolled away, knocking his eye into the edge of the coffee table. A lump began to form. I braced myself for a smack but on this occasion it never came. Instead, he just looked at me with a shocked expression, as if my loud scream had surprised him somehow. He was used to getting his own way, and I could tell he didn’t like the fact I’d resisted.

Most of Dad’s games involved some sort of physical contact: playing horsy with me on his back, wheelbarrows where my skirt would fall over my head exposing my knickers, rugby tackling or drenching me with water in the garden so that my thin summer clothes became transparent. Although I felt uncomfortable at times, I was so grateful not to be on the receiving end of Dad’s violence or bad temper that my overriding emotion was one of relief. I tried to smile, blotting out the parts I didn’t like, and pretended he was Pa Ingalls playing an innocent game in the sunshine with Half-Pint.

I was eleven and a half when an alarm bell rang in my head which I could no longer deny. I was lying on the floor on my tummy, in the classic children’s pose, watching cartoons. The room was dark and Dad was lying at my feet. Usually we both sat on the sofa with his legs on top of me, so it felt like a special occasion for me to be lying free on the floor. In a strange role reversal, he began to stroke my feet, tickling one minute, massaging deep the next. It felt lovely, and I realised why he had become addicted to me stroking his.

After some time his hand moved up to my calf. I was wearing a very loose pair of grey corduroy trousers, which had once belonged to Mum. The television provided the only light in the room. Mum was downstairs with Kat, as usual, and Dad and I were alone. One minute he was stroking my leg and I was enjoying the feeling, then suddenly he reached his hand higher under my trousers and began to stroke the back of my thigh just beneath my bottom. I stiffened as I realised he couldn’t possibly have run his fingertips under the elastic of my knickers by accident. It was as if a lightbulb had gone off
in my head. I began to put everything together: all the lewd remarks, the touching and the rude behaviour. I knew then that when he exposed an erection, or played a pornographic video instead of
Quincy QC
, as he had done recently, it was on purpose. I remembered Cheryl complaining to her friend Gail about him always trying to touch her up and I felt a sense of paralysis come over me. For the first time ever, I understood about Dad and what he liked to do and I was shocked.

The fear came next. As soon as I could manage without upsetting him, I left the room and ran up to my bedroom where I lay on my bed and cried tears of confusion and hopelessness. What could I do? I knew without asking that Mum would be no help.

Over the next few days I began to think of finding Nanny and Jenny. I wondered if they thought about me and, if so, why they never wrote. I wondered where Diane, Cheryl and Davie had gone? If only I could contact them, they might let me go and live with them. Every time Dad stared at me now, I worried that he could read my mind and would know that I was being a ‘betraying bastard’. I had seen in a letter that Nanny and Jenny had moved to Kent, to a place called Tunbridge Wells, but I couldn’t remember their address apart from the number 10. I had been trained for so long to put all thoughts of them out of my mind that I couldn’t think of the street name. Did it begin with an A or a C?

I felt sad when I realised that even if I could remember their address I wouldn’t know what to do. It would be too embarrassing to talk to them about Dad and the rude things he was doing. All I knew was that I wanted to be with people
who were clean, not dirty. I wanted people who loved me in a normal way, like the parents I saw walking with their children around the supermarket, but already I felt somehow contaminated. If I ever found Nanny again, she might look at me and see the shame and embarrassment that was beginning to leak from every pore. She might think I was dirty like Dad and not love me any more. It was better to remember her the way she had been in the past than to see her disappointed face now. I decided to forget about her and the rest of my family forever.