Nipper (17 page)

‘
My
TV, not yirs,’ he says in a deep, slurred voice. ‘That’s a’ yir good it, sitting there we yir miserable puss. Well what, what what do yi want me ti dae aboot it?’ He’s now talking in riddles. ‘Blame yir mum, dinna blame me, blame the neighbours. Dinna blame me.’

What on earth are you talking about?
I’m thinking.

‘Blame Maggie Thatcher,’ he shouts, swaying about in his chair. ‘It’s her fault we’ve no got a pot ti piss in.’ He stands up, turns towards me with his hands out by his sides, kind of like he’s on a cross. ‘That’s ma boy.’ Then he tries to kick me in the face. He misses as I move to the side, but he falls sideways, landing on top of me. ‘Oh good move, yi never seen that one coming, did yi?’

I obviously did, hence the fact you missed
.

‘Oh this is comfy.’ He’s now sitting on my head, squashing it into the couch. ‘What aboot dead legs, do ya like them?’ He starts punching me in the legs and ribs. ‘Do ya like them, good, ald. Dead. Legs.’

He’s punching me each time he says a word, and kind of singing as he does it. ‘Do you like dead legs, baby?’

He then turns over and kneels on my face, crushing the side that he has smacked earlier. I am in agony, screaming, ‘Dad stop,
stop Dad
.’ But this only seems to make him more angry.

‘Shut yir puss,’ he says, taking his knee off my head and replacing it with his big nicotine-stained hand. He covers my mouth and nose and is now laying his full bodyweight on top of me. ‘Shut yir puss, shut yir puss,’ he whispers. It’s so that the neighbours won’t hear.

I’m struggling because I can’t breathe and I feel like I’m going to pass out, but he just keeps moving his hand with my head from side to side. Then he lets go and starts laying into my face with both hands. One of my hands is stuck under my back and the other one is doing a crap job of blocking the blows. I can see the blood on his hands every time a punch comes and it’s starting to splatter on his top.

He suddenly stops and pulls me onto the floor by the hair, dragging me around saying, ‘Yi’ll no stale tatties fae this hoose again.’

That’s how messed up his head is – he’s now persuaded himself that I’ve stolen the spuds from him. That’s the last
thing on my mind though. I just want to get away from him to catch a breath. He drags me over to the kitchen door and leans me against it. I’m covering my face as by now I can’t stand any more: I’ve taken enough. My head is throbbing where he’s pulled my hair out.

‘Let is see yir face.’ I keep my hands tight over my face.

‘I’m no gonna hit ya, let is see yir face.’

He’s standing leaning over me. I can smell his putrid breath and I can see through my hands that he has one hand on the doorframe above me and the other with a clump of my blood-soaked hair in it.

‘Please dinna hit is again, Dad.’

‘I’ll no’, let is see.’

I think he must be panicked with the sight of the blood so I move my hands away.

‘Fuckin’ hell,’ he says. ‘Was that me?’

He crouches down beside me and puts one arm on his knee, leaning so he won’t fall over. He lifts his hand towards my face slowly, staring at me with the evil-looking squint in his eyes he gets when he’s drunk.

‘Fuckin’ hell,’ he says again as he touches my cheekbone. ‘What a fuckin’ mess, you’ll hae a shiner the mor’in.’

Then out of the blue.
Poke!

Aghhhgg!
Another one of them flashes again. He’s poked his index nicotine-stained finger straight into my eye.

Ahhgg, aghhgg
. Then it starts again for another three hours.

He drags me from one side of the room to the other, stamping on my head and picking things up from the table to hit me with, stopping every ten minutes for another drink. I can safely say I’ve had a few close shaves in my life but this feels like the closest I have ever come to dying.

He eventually falls asleep on the floor next to the fire as usual and I crawl upstairs to my bedroom, stopping at the bathroom to clean myself up.

I hobble in and sit down on the toilet, pulling my sleeves up to check my arms as apart from my head they are the things that are aching the most. I can hardly see any of my skin colour for purple and blue bruises and there are lumps sticking out of my forearms and hands. I stand up and walk over to the sink to wash the blood from my hands and face as I can feel it still running off the end of my nose. I turn the tap on and then tilt a small square mirror down to have a look.

Oh my God
. My face is covered in blood, both my eyes are three-quarters closed, my cheeks and eyebrows have open cuts with a little blood still trickling out of them and my lips are massive with dried blood on the inside. All this is horrible but I’m mesmerised by the sight of my hair.

I seem to have had an Eighties back comb, with a dark red Mohican up the middle. As I put my hands through it, clumps of hair fall out and my head looks like someone has lifted the scalp, inserted a load of golf balls and then sewed it back on. I give myself a quick once over with a wet cloth as I won’t risk turning the bath taps on in case he wakes up again.

I stumble into my room and sit on the end of the bed, with Bonnie sitting between my legs, licking one of the cuts on the inside of my arm. I’m just sitting there tickling behind Bonnie’s ears, thinking of what’s just happened. I can see in her eyes that she’s upset at the fact that she didn’t come down to help me, but I’m glad it wasn’t her.

The next morning I wake up with the bed sheet stuck to my face where all the blood from my open cuts has soaked into it. It’s nine o’clock and I can see the sunlight shining through a gap in the curtains. My eyes are now almost fully closed and my top lip is pressing against the underside of my nose. The worst thing though is my head: the areas that have had hair pulled out feel like a vice’s being tightened on them. Every part of me is swollen, bruised or cut, but I’m just thankful that Bonnie never got touched. I always feel worse the next day if she’s the one that gets hurt.

Dad has made some excuse to Mum why Tommy can’t come over next weekend and that gives him a couple of weeks for me to recover; he cannot risk Mum finding out. She’s already a bit suspicious after the time Dad took Tommy and me to watch Dundee United at Tannadice. Tommy was jumping around and Dad kept telling him to keep still and had his arms around him. I find out years later that when Tommy got back to Mum’s that weekend she found bruises all over him and asked him where they came from.

‘I was jumping around cheering and Dad was nipping me.’

Mum went ballistic. The following week social services came up to see if I was OK but I think they caught me on a day when Dad had just bought me some trainers or something. And the fact that I didn’t want to die that young made me keep my mouth shut about what he was doing.

Tommy tries to take his revenge on Dad over the next couple of years though. They’re more equally matched in strength and Tommy has always had much less fear of Dad than I’ve had. He hasn’t been terrorised by him all these years and as far as he’s concerned, Dad’s just a nasty cunt who deserves a good hiding and it’s only a matter of time before he’ll get it, Tommy says.

The first time he fights back is when Dad’s drunk and is trying to hit us both at the same time and Tommy manages to push Dad over the couch. Dad drags himself up from the floor and lurches around, trying to land a punch, but Tommy darts away and Dad’s just too pissed to retaliate.

After another fight with him Dad whacks Tommy in the face with a Pod sandal and is about to start on me. Tommy jumps up in rage and pushes him over the couch and as Dad lands on the floor Tommy runs out of the house. Dad’s trying to struggle back up to his feet, but he’s so full of alcohol he can’t make it.

‘Don’t listen to him,’ we can hear him shouting. ‘He’s full of shit like his mum.’

‘Come on, Charlie,’ Tommy calls out to me outside in the street as I stand in the front doorway. ‘Yi don’t want to stay here with that fuckin’ bastard. He’s crazy! Let’s go home to Mum’s.’

But although Dad’s too drunk to follow us, I’m now torn between following Tommy and my fear of Dad sobering up the next day and coming to get me. I can see a look that’s between sadness and anger on Tommy’s face and in the end I don’t dare leave the house. And when Tommy sees the look in my eyes – of pure fear – he starts to realise what kind of reign of terror Dad’s been subjecting me to all these years.

It hits him hard. In fact, he’s mad as hell about it and it makes me realise something. Dad sometimes tells me that Granddad used to beat up his brother, Uncle Danny, as well as beating up Dad. It made Dad really mad to see his little brother getting hurt and when I see how wound up Tommy is about Dad beating me up I get a kind of new insight into why Tommy reacts that way. It’s really a case of history repeating itself – except I still can’t imagine Granddad ever subjected either of his boys to the vicious physical barrages and mental torture Dad has inflicted on me over the years.

If Mum knew even a fraction of what had gone on over the last six years, I can’t imagine the consequences. But after years of keeping silent about my extended torture, it’s become second nature to keep quiet – and, now that we’re reunited, to keep it from Mum.

I’m too scared to say anything to her about it when I stay weekends, and she never asks me – not directly at least. But every time I see her, she says, ‘Is everything OK at your dad’s?’

‘Yeah it’s fine, Mum,’ I always reply.

But I don’t really need to say anything because ever since the night when Tommy tried to get me to leave with him, he’s been telling Mum and Dale what he’s guessed has been going on – he’s worked it all out from Dad’s habitual drunken, violent behaviour and from that scared look on my face. He only tells me about all this later and I still assume that Mum and Dale know nothing about how Dad treats me.

Then one weekend Dad goes to pick me up from Mum’s and she keeps me upstairs.

‘Wait a minute, son,’ she says, ‘yir dad’s downstairs, but can yi give us a hand with this?’

It’s a table by one of the beds she wants me to help her move and while I’m giving her a hand, Dale and Tommy go downstairs and Dale smashes Dad through the car window.

‘I know what you did to Charlie,’ he says and breaks his nose – and Tommy later tells me he’s joined in and slapped and punched Dad.

Of course Dale doesn’t really know a fraction of what Dad’s been up to – and I haven’t said anything. At first Dad says nothing when I return to him from Mum’s. He’s still nursing his broken nose and is quieter than usual, grumpy and morose, but at least he seems to lay off me for a while.

For a while…

But then it starts up all over again and within a few weeks he’s beating me with a vengeance, along with more interrogations.

‘What did you tell them, yi little bastard?’

‘Nothing, Dad. I didn’t say anything.’

‘So what did that fucker mean by “know what you did?” I suppose he got it from the fairies…Or maybe it was Tommy, eh? Has he been telling lies about me?’

‘No, Dad.’

‘I don’t believe you, you dirty little lying scumbag…’

And on and on he goes.

In years to come I wish I had told Mum everything as she would have killed him before he got me. But even after Dale and Tommy beat Dad up, I remain silent. I don’t want to have to tell her. Maybe she doesn’t really want to know the whole truth, I say to myself, and besides, it would break her heart if she discovered everything I’ve been through all this time. Yet I’m sure she must suspect it. After all, she of all people should know what Dad’s capable of, from the years of beatings she suffered at his hands.

Even so, I always believe that, if I say anything, Dad will slither his way out of it and then…I will die.

No beatings, no more hours and hours of taunts and torture.

I will simply be killed.

I
think the thing that confuses me most about Dad is his two personalities. Sober, he’s Funny Jock, who can be warm, generous and caring; but drunk he can turn in a flash into Evil Jock, an animal that doesn’t even look like him.

I do have some good times as a kid – it isn’t all blood and guts, even though beatings always seem to follow, just as night follows day. But there are a few times when they don’t – and one of them is when we go camping. I love being outdoors, out of the hellhole, and when we go camping most of the time we go with Dad’s friends, and he’ll never touch me when other people are around.

Today I’m going camping with my
good
dad – Funny Jock. I am eleven years old and we’re going with one of the neighbours and his son – Big Geoff and Wee Geoff, who are a right pair of characters.

Big Geoff is actually fairly short for a man – around five foot three in height – but he’s called Big Geoff because he weighs about sixteen stone and has quite a belly on him. He is hilarious, always laughing and joking and taking the piss out of Dad, which I love as he says things I’ve been dying to say for years.

Wee Geoff, on the other hand, is a skinny little lad, a few years younger than me, and nothing like his dad looks-wise – he has blond hair while Big Geoff has dark hair. But hanging around with Big Geoff for years has turned him into one of the funniest kids I’ve ever met. He’ll stand fishing with his back to us and suddenly let out an almighty fart.

‘Get oot and walk to the fart.’

Then Big Geoff will throw his bit in.

‘That wisna a fart, that was an accident waitin’ ti happen. You better check yir undies before yir cumin’ in that tent later.’

I end up crying with laughter as they’re like a double act.

We’ve arrived at a place called Crathy Bridge, not far from Aylyth at the foot of the Sidlaw Hills, which stretch from Perth to the north-east of Dundee, a distance of thirty miles. The bit we camp on is beside a river below the bridge. It’s kind of in a field surrounded by trees with a six-foot embankment running down the side of a twenty-foot wide flowing river.

We always pitch a four-man tent a few metres back from the edge in case someone rolls out of the tent sleeping and has
a midnight plunge, as the water is freezing. Everything is sorted and the adults are building a fire.