Mummy Knew (25 page)

Dad was sceptical I would be able to find one. ‘Got no qualifications now, has she?’ he laughed spitefully.

But straight away my eyes landed on an ad for a junior secretary at a record company. At first Dad was against it, but when he found out it was only ten minutes’ walk away his eyes lit up.

‘You can come home for lunch!’

My heart sank, and so did Mum’s by the way she rolled her eyes and gave a loud tut.

On the day of the interview my hands were trembling as I dug around in my drawers for something to wear. I couldn’t
find anything smart enough. I wore jeans when I went cleaning, and they wouldn’t do. I ended up putting on my old school uniform, which looked alright because it hadn’t been a proper uniform at all–just a light grey skirt and grey blouse, which had started off white.

It was a bright sunny February day, and Dad walked me the short distance to the record company offices. My confidence was at rock bottom because ever since I’d got the interview, Dad had been extra nasty, telling me I was a useless ‘spastic’ who didn’t know my arse from my elbow. He continued now.

‘They won’t want you anyway,’ he said. ‘You haven’t even got any O’ Levels.’

Before I could stop myself I said, ‘Yeah, but I would have had some, wouldn’t I?’

‘What do you mean by that?’ he demanded, stopping in his tracks.

Alarm bells began to ring. ‘I just meant that if I had stayed on at school, I would have sat them, and I might have got some.’

‘So is that what you’re gonna tell them, that you weren’t allowed to go to school?’ he asked. ‘’Cos’ if you’re gonna try and land me in any of that shit, I’ll knock you out now.’

‘No! No…’

‘’Cos I’ll take you back home right now and you can forget all about a poxy fucking job.’

We stood and stared at each other in the street. All I could do was wait and see what happened.

‘Come on or you’ll be late,’ he decided at last.

The job I was applying for was to work for the boss’s nineteen-year-old son Harry, who was starting an artists’ management division, and another guy called Graham who ran the agency that booked bands into gigs. The only typing experience I had ever had was the time I typed ‘the cat sat on the mat’ while out cleaning, so I didn’t reckon my chances much, but the ad hadn’t asked for previous experience so I kept my fingers crossed.

My interview was with the financial director Ros Newman, a birdlike, raven-haired woman with the blackest eyes and longest nails I had ever seen. When I filled out the bit on the application form about qualifications, I simply listed the ones I would have taken had Dad let me go to school and left the grades blank.

She gave me a typing test and I seemed to do okay. She asked me whether I took shorthand and I said no, but mentioned I might sign up for a speed-writing course I had seen advertised in the
Standard
. I didn’t actually know what speedwriting was, but Ros seemed impressed.

‘That shows initiative, Lisa,’ she said with a smile. ‘This is only a junior position, so we don’t expect you to have brilliant skills to start with. You can learn as you go along.’

I smiled, and tried not to think about Dad waiting for me downstairs. Then she said something that made my heart skip a beat.

‘Tell me about you, and about your family.’

I opened my mouth and stuttered for a moment, mindful of what Dad had drilled into me for years about not answering
questions; the need to keep ‘our fucking business, our fucking business.’

Ros’s smile faded as she waited for me to speak. What could I say about Mum and Dad and my family set-up that would make anyone want to give me a job? I went for the only positive thing I could think of. ‘My parents have worked for a record company in the West End for years.’ I named it, and her eyes lit up.

‘Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘I know Saul very well. Jewish family, like us. What do your parents do there?’

She may have been disappointed when I said they were the cleaners, but she positively glowed when I told her Mum always said the Jews were the best people you could possibly work for. I was thinking on my feet and putting a positive slant on Mum’s views. What she actually said was ‘They’re alright, but they work you into the fucking ground for peanuts, tight-fisted bastards.’

When Ros saw me out, she gave me a really warm handshake. I had to suppress a wince because my right hand had been painful since Dad had stamped on it over the Indian doctor thing. Ros asked me to ring her the next morning and she’d let me know.

The first thing Dad wanted to know was how much I would get paid, and whether it was weekly or monthly.

Next morning, he walked me to the phone box under the railway bridge and stood outside while I rang Ros.

‘Hello, Lisa,’ she said. ‘I’m pleased to tell you you’ve got the job. Can you start next Monday?’

Dad took me up the market so I could buy some work clothes. I got a couple of skirts and jumpers and a new pair of shoes. I was all kitted out, and suddenly the sky looked brighter. I read my horoscope in
The Sun
that day and it said I was about to enter a new cycle. I felt as though I was on the crest of a brand new wave.

I
started work at the record company and suddenly my life went from four walls and Dad’s abuse to mixing with a lot of musicians. The rest of the staff there were young and carefree, going to gigs most evenings and socialising with the bands. I’d fill out contracts for the gigs, complete with the bands’ requests for vodka and cheese-and-onion crisps in the dressing room. I was always being offered free tickets to concerts but of course I could never go.

Dad liked the fact I brought home a wage every month. He marched me up to the bank to open an account, and every month my salary was paid in. He took most of it, saying it was to pay for my keep, but I got a small allowance for toiletries such as sanitary towels and the odd new skirt.

I wasn’t allowed to mix with the other young people who worked at the company and I could tell they thought I was a bit of an oddball. Matters were made worse by the fact that every lunchtime Mum and Dad would meet me at the pub opposite. It used to be very awkward because everybody at the office used the pub too, and they would wonder why I didn’t
say hello. If I had, Dad would think I was ‘having it off’ with them, even if it was a woman.

So there I’d be, relatively normal in the office and yet at lunchtime I couldn’t even make eye contact with people who only a minute before I’d been chatting with at the photocopier, or making a cup of coffee for. It was especially awkward with Harry and Graham, my bosses. They were only young, and would often flirt with me, flashing smiles and making jokes, as they would with all the other young girls in the office. Over time I think they came to understand that my inhibition was less to do with shyness than something weird.

Sometimes, at five to one, just as I was getting ready to leave and meet Mum and Dad, Harry would ask me to go over to the sandwich shop and get him an egg mayonnaise on brown. My blood would run cold because I knew it would make me late for Dad, and there was no explanation as far as he was concerned other than that I had been having it off behind the filing cabinets.

At home Dad started a new regime. Every day when I got in from work there would be a knicker inspection in which I would have to remove my underwear and let him check it for semen. Some days I’d get an exploratory finger up the vagina too. Even if there was no evidence of sperm, I would be punished if Dad deemed it too moist because according to him that meant I had been fantasising about having it off behind the filing cabinets

I used to wonder why Dad let me go to work. Was it because he wanted time with Mum for ‘afternoon naps’? I hoped they might fall in love all over again, but in the mean-
time I began to plan how I would get away. It was difficult to imagine, because life was like a treadmill, each day running into the next with my every moment accounted for. Dad had timed the walk to work and if I was even a few minutes late home he would hurt me in countless ways. On the days he didn’t meet me at lunchtime he would insist I came home, so I never had a moment to myself.

Since Dad had told Mum I was now his girlfriend, they had continued to share a bed, but one day I arrived home from work and found her transferring her possessions into my room. She was doing a swap. Even though things were bad, this was even worse. It seemed to make everything more real.

‘What are you doing,’ I asked, feeling faint.

‘What’s it fucking look like?’ she snapped. ‘This is what his Lordship wants, and what he wants, he gets.’

I looked on, paralysed with shock. I had to find a way out of this. But I didn’t have a clue where to turn.

At Christmas 1983, the record company were having a party for employees in the West End. When I told Dad, I expected him to refuse to let me go, but he thought that might appear odd and above all he didn’t want me to lose the job. He knew that everyone wondered about my failure to mingle, so decided that if I were to stand any chance of keeping the job, I would have to go to the Christmas party. However, he announced that he would come along–as my boyfriend.

I felt physically sick at the thought of going anywhere in public with Dad, not to mention introducing him to everyone at work, so I was delighted when I found out that partners
weren’t invited. But Dad was furious. He’d already been down the market together with Mum and chosen a grey suede dress for me to wear. It was really tarty and not me at all. Because it was so clingy, it rode up when I wore tights. I said I didn’t want to wear it but for some reason Dad insisted: ‘We’ve paid good money for that.’ He told me to put stockings on instead of tights. ‘I can look forward to you coming home, then,’ he smirked.

My heart sank, because you could see the outline of the suspenders through the fabric.

I couldn’t work out what was going on. What was he doing pushing me to go to a Christmas party in a tarty dress with stockings showing through?

‘I feel sick,’ I said, trying to find a way to get out of it because I knew it would only mean trouble.

‘You’re fucking going,’ he said.

On the night, I met the receptionist, a girl called Susie, because we had planned to travel there together in a taxi.

‘You should come out more often,’ she said. ‘Get to know everyone.’

I tried not to look happy because I knew Dad was watching from the corner and I didn’t want to make him angry. When we arrived at the restaurant, the first thing I did before checking in my coat in was go to the loo and remove the stockings Dad had told me to wear. I put them in my coat pocket.

When I walked into the restaurant I could see all my colleagues were taken aback by my transformation. Usually I wore frumpy clothes but tonight the dress was what would be considered quite sexy. I felt very uncomfortable and tried
to slink into the background and not draw attention to myself. I grabbed a glass of champagne from a tray that was being handed round to try and ease my nerves. I wasn’t used to alcohol and it went straight to my head, but thanks to that champagne I was able to get through the evening without worrying too much about what would happen when I got home.

After the meal, everyone said they were going on to another club, but I knew I had to get back. I remember standing in the queue for the coats and when I got mine, Susie noticed the stockings poking out of my coat and pointed them out to Graham, my boss. They had a little laugh about it, to my great embarrassment. Outside, Susie and someone else I worked with called Neville put me in a black taxi.

When I got home, I jumped out and paid the cab. It pulled off. As I approached the front door to let myself in, Dad flung it open and dragged me in by the hair. I had never seen him in more of a rage. He beat me senseless, kicking me all over the room. Much of it’s a blur but he was shouting that I had come home in a white Rover car instead of a black taxi and he wanted to know who was in the car. I was the biggest cunt, the biggest slut in the world. Look I’d even taken the stockings off. He pulled my hair and bit me all over. He stripped me of my clothes and raped me anally. Usually he tried not to mark my face but the next day I had a big bruise down one side of it. He interrogated me mercilessly all night long, while drinking vodka and flicking lit cigarettes at my eyes.

All the while Mum was upstairs. She couldn’t possibly have slept through it because he was screaming and raging like a
madman. I remember at one point he made me drink neat vodka. I was choking and a part of me just wanted to die. I was sick immediately afterwards, and for that he beat me even more. By the end of it all I was delirious with confusion and I was even starting to wonder whose white Rover I had come home in and who I had had sex with in the back.

For days and days the interrogations and beatings continued. I had to go over everything about the evening in minute detail. He kept asking me about the white Rover but I didn’t know anything about a white Rover. He even dragged me down to the restaurant in the West End to check on the road configuration and the flow of traffic in the place where I said I had got the taxi. The whole time I had been at the record company I had never flirted with anybody, even though there was plenty of opportunity since everyone I worked with was young and there were lots of bands in all the time. I just knew it was more than my life was worth to flirt with anyone, and I got upset if any of the guys were playful with me. I didn’t know how to handle normal social interactions like that.

Christmas was terrible, with Dad’s violence continuing as viciously as ever. I was a nervous wreck. On my seventeenth birthday, just before New Year, Dad’s sister Lesley turned up unexpectedly with her two sons Charlie and George and another relative I hadn’t met before.

Nobody apart from Mum knew what Dad had done to me. As far as they were concerned, I was still the daughter. I ran and hid in the bathroom because I didn’t know how to behave in front of them–it was all too much. I found it hard not to
scream and blurt out what was happening to me. Dad followed, and told me through gritted teeth to get that grey dress on as we were all going over the pub.