The Little Prisoner (11 page)

Richard’s mum seemed to hate me almost as much as he did and was always pinching and poking at me when we went round there. She and Mum got on quite well, going to Bingo together and everything, but when I was tiny Mum used to make sure she stood between Nan and me.

Nan lived about five miles away from our house to begin with and Richard often used to take me with him on visits because it involved long walks through the woods. We would always have to stop on the way there or back so that I could do him a favour. If there were too many people around and he wasn’t able to get me alone he would become really angry and we would have to keep walking until we found a secluded spot. Sometimes he got so carried away with it all we wouldn’t have time to go and see his mum and would have to go straight back home after doing it.

On one of these occasions we were meant to be borrowing some sugar or something and when we got back Mum asked for it. When she saw we didn’t have it, she asked if we had actually been to Nan’s.

‘No,’ Richard said, obviously worried she might ask Nan.

‘Yes,’ I said simultaneously, assuming he would want me to lie.

‘I mean, no,’ I corrected myself quickly, pretending not to see Mum’s perplexed expression.

When Nan said she needed a fireplace building in her front room Richard agreed to do it for her, and of course I had to go with him every day. Nan had gone away while the work was being done but one of my cousins was living there and wanted me to play with her when I went round.

One day Richard said I could play out for a bit. ‘As long as you don’t go too far,’ he warned.

After a while he called me back in and I knew what it was for.

‘I’ll come in with you,’ my cousin said.

‘No, don’t,’ I begged her. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’ But she wouldn’t listen. She was getting annoyed with Richard and me because she didn’t understand why I always had to be with him.

When he saw her coming in with me he became angry, just as I knew he would. He told her to go back out.

‘No,’ she replied. ‘I live here. I can do what I want.’

My blood would always run cold when other people argued with my stepfather, as I knew that he would be taking his anger out on me later. Now he wasn’t going to climb down and became so angry that eventually my cousin went upstairs, shouting abuse as she went.

‘Fuck off!’ he shouted after her. ‘You fat ugly bitch!’

He then took me into the front room, where he was building the fireplace, shut the door and leaned against it, pulling his trousers down and telling me to masturbate him while he played with my chest.

After a few minutes I heard my cousin coming downstairs, calling me to come back outside. She tried to open the door but Richard was leaning his full weight against it, shouting at her to fuck off or he was going to hit her. Eventually she gave up and went outside, shouting as she went. He finished himself off but still wouldn’t let me go with her, forcing me to stay in the living room with him and watching while he worked. When Nan got home he told her how bad my cousin had been and how she needed a good hiding, and made me back him up.

His Cortina provided him with another venue for getting me on my own. He would take me with him as he drove around the various DIY stores that he liked, making me sit or lie on the floor in the back with my arm round his seat so that I could masturbate him in the front while he drove. I always knew what he was planning because he would go to the toilet before we left and get a wad of toilet roll or a rag to clear up his mess. Sometimes it would take ages to finish him off as we drove around the lanes and my arm would be burning with pain from the angle I had to work from, but I wouldn’t dare to stop until he told me to. If it was dark and we had reached somewhere deserted, we would pull up and he would let me sit in the front seat next to him to do it. When I got older and was too big to squat in the back, I would sit beside him with a newspaper or jumper over my arm while I did it for him.

Once we were at the DIY stores he would make me swap the stickers on the products he wanted with cheaper ones. He was always looking for an angle to get out of paying his way. I used to walk around behind him, terrified that one of the shop assistants would challenge him or not treat him with the respect he felt he deserved and he would start a vicious fight in the aisles.

His car gave him a whole other area to vent his aggressions on the rest of the world. If any other motorist did anything to offend him, like changing lanes in front of him, driving too close or causing him to slow down, he would go after them. If their windows were open he would shout abuse and spit at them. Once he’d caught up with them and forced them to stop he would be out of the car and attacking them with his wheel brace. If it was a woman driver he would send my mother to do his dirty work or, when I was old enough to pick fights with adults, me.

He was always thinking of new night-time rituals for us, particularly if Mum was out of the house, as he knew the boys would never dare to disturb us.

‘Stand on the bed,’ he ordered me when I was still very tiny. ‘Take your clothes off. Turn round.’

When I was standing, naked, with my back towards him he would turn as well, so we were back to back, then put his arms back round me and stretch my body across his back, making my spine crunch painfully. Afterwards I would be paralysed for a few moments, unable to move because of the pain.

As I got older and too heavy to hoist onto his back, he would pour lotion on both of our naked bodies, rub it around and then lie me on top of him, sliding me up and down, rubbing his penis on my vagina. He would then swap so he was on top, but he never penetrated me.

Another game he enjoyed would be making me strip naked in the living room and kneel. I would have to hold my arms out straight and he would place the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
on them. The book had come into the house from a salesman who had called one afternoon while we were all out the front washing the car. Usually anyone who came to the door like that was told to piss off, but for some reason this man caught their attention. Maybe Richard was in a particularly good mood, or maybe the salesman uttered the magic word ‘free’. I watched open-mouthed as Richard bantered with him, wondering what angle he was about to work. The man was offering some sort of deal that meant that if they signed up they would receive a couple of free volumes or something. Richard convinced him that he should leave the free volumes anyway and maybe they would sign up later. When the man came back later, of course he was told to piss off. I don’t remember anyone in the family ever actually looking inside the books.

Now they were a new means of torture. As my arms began to shake, Richard would add another volume and then he would balance his brown glass Britvic pub ashtray on top. If my arms dropped at all, the ashtray would slide off and he would kick me in the back or the head, shouting at me like a sergeant major to keep my arms up. The agony was intense and when my arms would shake with the strain it would make him even angrier. He seemed to enjoy that sort of torture almost as much as the sexual ones.

When my real life became unbearable I used to retreat inside my head into a fantasy world. Sometimes I would imagine that I was Cinderella, slaving away for my evil stepfather rather than my evil stepmother, and that one day my Fairy Godmother would come and I would be taken to the ball to meet Prince Charming, who would whisk me away from home and marry me. If I could convince myself, even for a few minutes, that there was going to be a happy ending to my story, then I could keep going.

At other times I began to think I was Jesus and I had come back down to Earth to suffer some more in order to save people, just like he did in the Bible. If there was some point to my suffering, then it was easier to bear.

Many years later, when I told these fantasies to a psychologist, he said he thought they might have been what kept me sane through those years, life rafts which allowed me to believe that things would be better one day and that all the suffering wasn’t for nothing.

When I was at senior school a girl called Tanya came back to the school after being taken away because of being bullied. I happened to be outside the head of year’s study on the morning she arrived. I’d been caught smoking, which happened frequently and which the head of year had given up trying to do anything about, as he knew my parents encouraged me. Tanya was sitting beside me.

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.

‘I’ve got to come back,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t get into any other school.’

At that moment a group of the girls who had been bullying her came past, making threatening sucking noises with their teeth, and I could see she was really frightened. We were both called into the head of year’s study together. ‘Right, Jane,’ he said. ‘I’m going to put Tanya in your class and you’ve got to look after her.’ From that moment we became inseparable.

Right away I could see that we were going to have to face down the gang that was bullying Tanya. She was even frightened to go into the toilets because she knew they would follow her in and give her a hard time.

‘I’ll wait till I get home,’ she said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘You go to the toilet when you want to. I’ll come in with you.’

Sure enough, they followed us in and started mixing it. I think my experiences with Silly Git had made me especially sensitive to bullying. I just couldn’t stand it. There was another girl in the year below us who was a bit of a pitiful figure, always smelling of wee and covered in nits. She used to be bullied so much she would have fits and I started sitting next to her on the bus so that I could protect her, but I would have to get off a few stops before her and the moment the bus pulled away I would see them all jumping on her. I really hated having to leave her with them every day.

Anyway, the gang never bothered Tanya again once I’d made it clear that if they did they would be bothering me as well. I daresay they were wary of me, aware that I came from a family that was known for its violence. The training in aggression that Richard and Mum had given me had actually come in useful for once. I think being well liked by everyone helped too, as no one had any reason to fall out with me.

Tanya and I used to do everything together and she would come to our house to knock for me in the mornings so we could walk to school together. Sometimes Silly Git would give her a hard time when he found her in the house, swinging her round by her ponytail until her feet came off the floor, for instance, which was something he used to do all the time to me, pretending it was all just fun. Another time she arrived proudly wearing a big new clip in her hair and he simply snatched it off her head, dropped it on the floor and stamped on it.

‘You don’t have to knock for me,’ I told her after one of these incidents, ‘just wait on the corner till I come out.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t care.’

One evening we were due to go down to a fair together. Tanya came to knock for me at the time I’d told her, but Richard deliberately kept me hanging around for an extra hour and a half doing my chores, so she had to wait. It was a long walk to the fair and I was told I had to be back in early, so we had hardly any time there. Tanya was really fed up about it and asked me why Richard acted so weirdly all the time. We had become so close by then that I decided I could tell her the truth. She was the first person I’d told since Hayley. She was obviously shocked, but didn’t get silly about it and I was glad that I had decided to take her into my confidence.

A few days later Mum had gone out unexpectedly and Richard had decided to make me do him a favour in the front room after school. He was just getting into his stride when there was a knock on the front door.

‘That fucking cunt Tanya’s at the door,’ he said after peeking through the curtains. ‘I’ll get rid of her.’

He went out into the hall and I heard him going to the door and opening it.

‘She ain’t fucking here,’ he snarled.

‘Oh, right,’ I heard Tanya say, ‘so where is she?’

‘She’s buying a toothbrush over the Parade.’

He slammed the door shut and came back into the front room. ‘If you do it good,’ he said, ‘you can go out and find her afterwards.’