Mummy Knew (18 page)

I threw my school uniform onto the bed and stepped into a white skirt and shoes and burrowed in my drawer to find a crumpled blue striped top. It had a drip of ketchup down the front but it would have to do. When I was dressed I stood on my bed to try and see myself in the little mirror that was balanced on the drawers. I felt as free as a bird, excited at all the future nights out to come. I may not have enjoyed my teenage years so far, but I was determined to start.

I brushed my shoulder-length hair, wishing I’d washed it when I’d had a bath on Sunday, and smeared a bit of Vaseline onto my lips and eyelashes just as Brooke Shields had recommended in a magazine. Finally satisfied with my appearance, I flew down the stairs, keen to get out while the going was good. I was exalted at my sudden taste of freedom.

‘Bye!’ I shouted as I walked along the hallway.

I was just about to open the front door when Dad came thundering down the stairs. He grabbed me from behind and pushed my face up against the door, squashing my front teeth against my lips. I tasted blood. It all happened so quickly that at first I didn’t feel the slaps, kicks and punches that followed.

‘You want to go out with that prat Karen, do you?’ he shouted in my ear. The next thing I heard was ‘fucking-whore-bastard-cunt’–a long stream of expletives shouted with every whack, as though he was keeping time with a set of drums.

He punched my back so hard that I was winded, and shook my hair until I felt dizzy. I was aware of the noise my body made as it slammed into the thin walls in the hallway. I knew Mum was sitting in the next room listening, but she refused to show her face. If she had dared to venture out, she might have had to ask herself why my dad was behaving more like a psychotically jealous husband than a father.

Finally, just when I thought the onslaught was over, he reached up under my skirt, grabbed my knickers and shook me back and forth like a dog with a bone. I heard the sound of ripping fabric and felt the elastic cutting sharply into my flesh. He then chucked me out into the street with a final kick up the behind. I landed full force on my knees, and heard him slamming the front door behind me.

For a minute or two I was too shocked to move, then adrenaline forced me into action. I had to get away before he came out and dragged me back inside. I stood up and limped away, my head still spinning, hoping that nobody had seen. I
may have been used to all sorts of terrible things, but I was still a self-conscious teenager who didn’t want to be humiliated in front of the neighbours.

As I made my way towards Karen’s flats, a few minutes’ walk away, I kept looking over my shoulder, convinced that Dad would rear up like a monster at any moment. I had to use my wrists as a sort of brace to stop my torn knickers falling down as I walked and when I got into the stairwell of Karen’s block, I had no choice but to remove them and chuck them in the rubbish chute. Obviously I was very upset inside, but I had learned to compartmentalise my feelings as a matter of survival. I had been through far worse in my time, so when I reached Karen’s flat on the third floor, I put my anguish and pain into the same mental box that contained all the other dreadful experiences.

Despite my efforts to conceal what I had just been through, Karen looked at me and knew immediately that something was wrong.

‘What’s the matter, Lisa. You look upset,’ she probed.

I shrugged off her concerns with laughter, giving no further clue that anything was wrong. We set out to make the most of our rare evening together, but I kept peeking over my shoulder every few minutes, terrified Dad would appear and drag me home.

We went to a youth club, and I couldn’t help but envy all the kids who were free to go there every night and play table tennis or listen to Duran Duran on the cassette player. Karen bought me a coke and a bag of crisps and we went to sit near some slightly older boys who were in charge of the music.

‘Alright, girls?’ one said and we giggled into our crisps.

When I said goodnight to her on the corner, the sun was setting orange, low in the sky. I had really enjoyed myself, but I knew I wouldn’t dare go out with her again. My stomach churned as I walked slowly up the path to our peeling front door, knowing that one way or another I would have to pay the price for my little taste of freedom.

And I was right. Dad was extra nasty to me for weeks after that. He would often remind me of my ‘betrayal’ and would lie with his forearm covering my throat so that I could barely breathe while he warned me not to be a whore and ‘fuck him over’. He was so vicious and spiteful that I gave up all hope of ever going out after school again. Youth clubs were for other teenagers, not for the likes of me.

O
ne day I came home from school to find Mum standing in the kitchen ripping a piece of paper to shreds. It looked like a letter. I wondered whether it was from my sisters, but when she dropped a scrap on the floor, I recognised Jenny’s distinctive handwriting.

‘Is that from Jenny?’ I asked, almost making myself jump because I’d said her name out loud.

‘Nanny’s dead,’ Mum said shortly, chucking the shredded letter into the bin and emptying an ashtray on top of it.

‘No!’ I felt as though I’d been punched in the pit of my stomach. I ran up to my room and cried and cried until I had no tears left. I was so used to smothering all thoughts of Nanny and the rest of my lost family that I struggled at first to summon up her image–of course there were no photos to look at round the house. But I would never forget how soft, warm and safe I felt when I used to sit on her lap and cuddle her. I was desolate that I hadn’t been able to tell her how much I loved her one last time, and I hoped she hadn’t buried all thoughts of me over the years, as I had had to do with my memories of her. Now there was no stopping the pain I felt. I
was distraught. I had always hoped we’d be together again one day when I was old enough to break free from Mum and Dad. I’d fantasised about turning up on her doorstep, safe at last. But now she was gone forever, and so was a little piece of me.

Later I heard Dad laughing in the kitchen and singing ‘Ding, dong, the witch is dead!’ from
The Wizard of Oz
, and I wished I had the courage to kill him.

I began to wonder then if Mum was capable of ever feeling anything. The mother who had shown her nothing but love and support had been cruelly discarded many years before when Dad moved into her life. Now Nanny was dead and Mum hadn’t shed a tear. What sort of woman was she to have turned her back on her own family for a man she now knew was abusing her daughter? It had been years since she’d last seen her mother, or any of her many brothers and sisters.

Perhaps worst of all, she had chosen Dad over every one of her children. Diane’s baby would be nearly two years old by now, and she had no idea if it was a boy or a girl. Cheryl had turned up at the front door one day flanked by her fiancé and begged Mum to go to her wedding, but she was given short shrift. As for Davie, she didn’t seem to care if he were alive or dead. All this for a man who was now betraying her in the cruellest possible way by abusing her own daughter.

In her eyes, Dad could do no wrong. There was no price she wouldn’t pay to keep him happy, and if my life was ruined in the process, it didn’t matter. She would let him have his way. I couldn’t begin to understand how Mum could love such a man, but I knew she did. Somehow he had her mesmerised, like a snake with its prey. Besides, she would have been too
proud ever to admit that she had ‘picked a bad ’un’, as Nanny used to say. She’d given up everything for Dad and tolerated more than any other woman would, so there wouldn’t be any backing out now.

In 1980 the film
The Blue Lagoon
came out, starring a fourteen-year-old Brooke Shields. Pictures of Brooke were splashed all over every newspaper, and I remember reading in Dad’s copy of
The Sun
how a debate was raging about whether the film was ‘kiddie porn’. Dad became obsessed with the story.

‘She’s so sensual,’ he said. ‘She exudes sex.’

He began to liken me to Brooke Shields, even though the only trait we had in common was brown hair. He took a poster of her into the toilet with him and the next time I saw it, it was splattered with his semen. Soon he started to tell me I exuded sex too, but I knew I didn’t; he just wanted to blame me for his wicked ways.

Dad’s abuse of me gradually started to escalate further. He would grab me at all hours of the day or night and didn’t care whether he made a noise or not. Sometimes Mum was in the house, and other times he would send her out on an errand and make the most of the opportunity to enjoy a prolonged session in which he would subject me to the most degrading acts.

Although this was now a way of life, and to a degree I was used to it, there were still some things I resisted doing. Up until this point he had done everything he could to me, except take my virginity, but I would remain passive throughout. Periodically he would grab my hands and try to wrap them
around his penis but I would always cry, and although he would get angry, he would always move on to something different. Another time he tried to force himself into my mouth but I gagged and was sick. After slapping and kicking me, he seemed to resign himself to the fact that I wasn’t able to do those things, but I knew it was only a matter of time before he forced me with violence because he would always mutter an ominous ‘I’ll let you off…for now.’

I had developed my own coping mechanisms, which helped me detach from most of the things he did to me–little techniques like reciting poems or times tables in my head. Sometimes I even read a magazine or watched a programme on the television while Dad carried out his depravities.

But I could tell he was losing patience with what he saw as my lack of participation. One day he picked up the magazine I was reading and threw it to the other side of the room. Instinctively I curled into the foetal position and covered my head.

‘You make me feel like I’m a fucking necro or something,’ he shouted above me. ‘You better liven yourself up, girl.’

Only the day before he had made me watch a video nasty with him. It was about a necrophiliac, a man who liked having sex with dead people, so I knew exactly what he meant.

‘I’m getting fucking sick of this,’ he shouted, pulling me up by the hair and positioning me between his legs, on my knees. ‘Put your fucking hand round it,’ he ordered, placing his hand over mine on his penis, ‘and move it up and down like that.’

My face burned with shame and I felt bile rising in my throat. I knew he’d want me to do this every time now; it was
his pattern, the way it worked whenever he introduced something new.

‘Don’t fucking stop, you silly bitch,’ he shouted, slapping the side of my head. ‘Go on, that’s it.’

Thankfully it was over soon enough. But it wasn’t long before he wanted to do it again, and this time he insisted on thrusting himself into my mouth, too.

I wailed and cried, twisting my face away, hoping he would stop, as he always had before when I made a lot of noise, but he held my head firmly in place. I tried to clamp my mouth together but he used his penis as a sort of battering ram, pushing it against my teeth.

‘You trying to bite me, you fucking whore? You trying to fucking bite me?’

He kicked me over to the other side of the room, where I pushed myself up against the window. I could hear the sounds of normal life out on the street below as the mechanics from the repair shop next door laughed and joked outside on the pavement, metal clanging as they rifled through their tool boxes, totally oblivious to my terror only a dozen feet above them in our front room.

‘Stop snivelling, you snot-nosed little cunt, and get your laughing gear round this. We’re going to do a sixty-nine.’

By this time my eyes were so swollen from tears I could barely see. My hair was matted and stuck to my face. I didn’t think it was possible for him to hurt me any more than he already had, but then he began to bite, and poke his fingers deep inside me. He was like a depraved animal. Was this a sixty-nine? I had no idea.

I had felt a heavy burden of guilt and shame ever since the first time Dad touched me, but now that he was forcing me to play a more active role, I felt as though it was smothering me. Whereas before I had been completely passive, he now made me do things too and I felt almost complicit in my own abuse. On one level I knew my thinking was wrong–no child wants to be violated in such a way–but still I couldn’t stop the demon on my shoulder. What sort of girl must I be to do such things? I felt filthy and totally worthless. I didn’t ask him to abuse me. I wanted it to stop. It wasn’t my choice, but I had got to a stage where I just accepted it as my lot in life. It had become almost normal.

But I was still aware enough to know it wasn’t the kind of normal I wanted. I wanted the kind I imagined the girls at school had; the kind of normal teenage life that was relatively carefree, and involved experimenting with clothes, make-up, music and even boys. I had none of these things. I had never even had a first crush. I might as well have been kept prisoner since I was twelve years old. I would watch
Top of the Pops
on TV and see all the young people dancing and having fun, and I wondered if my life would ever be that way. But somehow I couldn’t see it; not with Dad controlling my every waking moment.

One day he announced that we were going on holiday. He was going to take Kat and me to Florida for three weeks.

‘What about Mum?’ I asked, alarm bells ringing.

‘I’ll be staying here,’ she said. ‘Someone’s got to work. That building won’t clean itself, you know.’

My stomach began to churn at the prospect of being trapped with Dad in one room for three weeks. It didn’t
matter to me that it would be in Florida; I knew it would be a nightmare, and, what was worse, little Kat would be coming along too, and might witness his sexual abuse of me or maybe he’d even try it on her. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to stop himself.

Dad leered at me from his place on the sofa.