The Little Prisoner (13 page)

Despite all the things that he did to me physically, Richard still seemed to have a fantasy life about me as well. When I was about sixteen I came home one evening from work while it was still light. Mum had taken the boys to their boxing lesson, as she always did now, and when I walked in Richard told me to have a bath immediately so the water would be hot again for the others later.

I went upstairs with a heavy heart, assuming he was going to be using it as an excuse to come into the bathroom and abuse me. There was nothing I could do to keep him out because he’d taken the lock off the door, saying that he didn’t want any locked doors in his house, which was a bit ironic given the state of his shed and all the outside doors. I guess an internal locked door would have limited his power to go wherever he wanted in the house whenever he wanted. If any one of the inside doors had had a lock we would have been able to escape him, if only for a few minutes at a time, and he wouldn’t have been able to tolerate that.

As I undressed I had a strange feeling that something creepy was about to happen. I got into the bath quickly. trying to cover myself, feeling that I was being watched. I couldn’t work out if there was a hole in the door where the lock had been or not. I rushed my bath, climbed out and swung the door open quickly, wondering if it was all in my mind, and wasn’t able to stop myself from screaming as I almost tripped over Richard kneeling on the floor with his jeans and pants around his ankles and his penis in his hand. I slammed the door shut and heard him scuffling around outside, gathering himself together. When I was sure he’d gone to his bedroom I dried myself as fast as I could and went to my bedroom to dress. The incident was never mentioned again, which was odd since Richard was never usually embarrassed when it came to talking about his urges and what he was going to be doing to me.

Usually he would try to make out that everything he did was a joke. Sometimes when I was in the kitchen washing up he would creep up behind me and stick a plastic carrier bag over my head or wrap my face in cling film. He would be laughing and I wouldn’t be able to fight back or say it was hurting or frightening me because then I would be in trouble for being ‘moody’. The first few times I instinctively fought to get the bags off, just as I had tried to fight my way out from underneath the pillows he put over my face, or I would try to push a hole through the plastic to my mouth so that I could get some air, but it only made him angry so I changed my tactics, as I had with the pillows, and just stood there, trying to carry on with the washing up as if nothing was happening, fighting to overcome the urge to panic. I hoped it would make the game too boring for him, but it just angered him because he thought I wasn’t playing along in the right spirit. I don’t know what reaction I could have come up with that would have pleased him. I doubt there was one actually.

His mum had moved away from the area by then and lived a seven-hour drive away. Every so often he used to announce out of the blue that he was taking me to stay with her for a few days. I had to go to help him ‘because of his bad leg’. I dreaded the thought of being more or less alone with him for several days in a row, knowing that my nan and granddad would never suspect a thing and wouldn’t be able to do anything to protect me even if they’d wanted to.

The reason Nan had moved was in order to live next to her sister in one of those bungalows for old people, which meant she was next door drinking tea most of the time we were there. Granddad was past noticing anything, having reached the stage of putting his shoes in the fridge and making himself teabag sandwiches. He was a nice old boy who had worked all his life as a cabinetmaker, never taking a day off and always beavering away in his shed. I never heard him swear once, which made him very different from the rest of the family. The day he retired he started to go a bit funny in the head. I guess his work had provided an escape from the reality of his marriage.

Their bungalow was in a little hamlet of about ten houses and one shop. I remember the house opposite kept a huge seal in a pond in their garden. They’d rescued it after it was washed ashore in a storm as a baby and had looked after it ever since. It snowed one year when my stepdad and I were up there and I was trapped in the house with him for a week, with him acting like we were a couple or something.

Although Nan was never nice to me when I was a child, she did relent when I was about sixteen. She had just been told she had cancer and she called me over to her chair to tell me that she was sorry for everything and that she did love me really. It made me cry my eyes out, especially as she died not long after that.

Richard had a sister, too, who was as aggressive as he was. I remember Mum telling me she walked into a pub with her once and my aunt plonked one of her feet on the bar and asked a complete stranger if he liked her ‘fucking boots’. She was one of the few people who would fight Richard back, hitting as hard as he did. Once she went for him with her stiletto heel.

The night before we were due to leave on one of our trips to Nan’s, Richard and I were in the kitchen at home together. Mum had gone next door with Les to borrow the phone and the other boys were in the front room watching television. Richard started telling me all the things he and I would be doing on the way there and back, as well as while we were there. It was as if he thought I would be as pleased and excited as he was at the prospect. I was becoming angrier and angrier and I kept hearing a song in my head that had been featured on the television series
Grange Hill,
‘Just say no’. I’d been thinking about those lyrics for years and for some reason, when Richard asked me if I wanted to do all these things, I just said, ‘No.’

I immediately knew I’d made a huge mistake. He pressed his forehead against mine, his eyes drilling into my eyes, cold and angry, his breath on my face.

‘What?’

I don’t know why, but I said ‘No’ again. It was as if some tiny spark of courage had finally been kindled into a flame deep inside my head.

His fist came up from nowhere and punched my head back against the tiles of the wall behind me. I started crying and tried to say sorry, but I’d made him too angry to be able to calm down now. Lost in a black fog of anger, he punched me over and over again, then grabbed my hair, dragging me away from the wall and literally kicking me into the air and out into the hallway, past the open door to the front room where my brothers were sitting. When I landed he chased after me, still kicking and shouting and telling me I was ‘an ungrateful cunt’. My brothers were screaming from the sofa for him to stop, frightened he was going to kill me, but none of them daring to move, knowing that he would turn his fury on them if they tried to interfere.

We all heard Mum’s key in the door.

‘Get up and sort yourself out,’ Richard ordered.

I stood up and tried to tidy myself as he yelled at the boys to shut up. There were clumps of my hair on the pristine red carpet and my face was blotchy from the blows. As Mum walked in I straightened myself up. The boys were silent, white-faced and shaky.

Mum must have been able to hear the screams from next door and from outside, but she was as anxious as the boys not to have Richard turn on her next.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ she asked me, sounding mildly irritated to find that I was making a fuss about something yet again.

‘Something in my eye,’ I replied, a line I often used to explain why it might look as if my eyes were watering.

As always, Mum accepted what I said at face value and didn’t ask anything else.

Considering how controlling Richard was about everything I did and everywhere I went, he was surprisingly keen for me to get a boyfriend and start having sex, and he put me on the pill as soon as he could, even before I had left school. The fact that my periods were so incessant and painful gave him an ideal excuse.

He also suggested that a girlfriend and I went down to Southend with a couple of boys to stay in my uncle’s caravan. In the end the boys weren’t able to get away from work, but my friend and I still went and met up with some other boys when we were down there. It was a brilliant holiday, except for one incident when one of the boys was messing about with a big pebble which my cousins must have brought in from the beach and varnished. He was chucking it from hand to hand while standing in front of the caravan window and catching it just in time. I was asking him not to and then he missed the catch and it hit the window. I went mental, imagining how much trouble I was going to get into for this, and I made the poor boy call out someone at Bank Holiday rates to replace the window.

It was a great holiday, but it left me puzzled as to why I had suddenly been allowed to do something so grown up. It gave me a shred of hope that maybe things were going to get better.

When I got back home one of the boys we had met sent me a love letter. Richard intercepted my post as always and read it out loud to the whole family while I sat there crying my eyes out, feeling humiliated and realizing I wasn’t free yet.

There was a boy called Nick living in our street who was a year older than me and had already left school to become a scaffolder, and I thought he was fantastic. All the girls fancied him. Hayley and I used to watch him walking past our houses from behind net curtains, giggling and sighing and fantasizing about him asking us out. I would never have let him know how I felt because I would have been too embarrassed and because I wouldn’t have wanted my stepdad to know that I fancied someone in case he turned nasty on them.

I was coming back from school as normal one afternoon and as I approached the house I knew the sitting room had been stripped out in order to be redecorated yet again. The giveaway sign was that the windows had been smeared with Windolene so that people couldn’t see in while the curtains were down. As I went in Richard greeted me in a particularly good mood. Decorating always seemed to make him happy.

The windows were open to let out the fumes from the paint and from inside the room I saw Nick coming down the street, going towards his house. Richard spotted him as well and must have seen something in my expression because he started singing, ‘Love is in the air! Janey’s in love with Nick.’

I could see that Nick could hear and just wanted to curl up and die. Then Richard started calling out to him like a stupid schoolkid: ‘Janey loves you, Nick!’

He wrote the same message in the Windolene with his finger for everyone, including Nick, to see. I had to laugh with him or I would have been in trouble for being a miserable cow, but actually I was just shrivelling up from embarrassment.

Richard wasn’t going to let it drop either. Every day Nick would walk past the house and Richard would shout at him again, until eventually he got a grinning response out of the boy and finally he was inviting him in for a cup of tea. Nick’s visits began to become a regular thing and I started to go out with him. Although I’d been so angry with Richard at the beginning, I had to admit that this was a bit of a result for me, as I’d fancied Nick for so long and would never have plucked up the courage to talk to him myself.

I began to think that maybe this would mark the end of the abuse. If Richard was matching me up with someone else, maybe he was planning to leave me alone himself. Perhaps now that I was no longer a child, he was finally losing interest in me and would be willing to let me step out from under his tyrannical rule.

I don’t know why I was so optimistic. There had already been so many times when I’d thought that maybe Richard would change his ways. I’d hoped he would stop when I reached puberty and with every birthday since I’d hoped that he would lose interest in me, but it never happened. Occasionally I would ask if we could stop doing things and he would say we could, as long as I did him ‘one last special favour’. I would do whatever it was, but it wouldn’t make any difference, he’d find an excuse for me to do something else again the next day.

Sometimes I would try to use my period as an excuse for why we couldn’t do something he wanted, occasionally lying about the dates, but he even found a way of turning that against me.

‘You dirty little bitch,’ he shouted at me as he came downstairs from the bathroom one day. ‘You left your fucking jam rags in the toilet and I had to flush them away.’

I knew he’d made it up because I wasn’t on my period, even though I’d told him I was, and I knew for a fact it was nothing to do with Mum, but I couldn’t say anything or I would have given myself away. I think he just got a kick out of talking to me in a degrading way. But if I actually had a boyfriend, I told myself, things were bound to be different. He wasn’t going to want to share me, was he?

As soon as I realized Richard was going to allow it, I spent as much time as I could at Nick’s house. His family were so nice. His mum really seemed to approve of me for her boy. She would buy me gold jewellery and even had a picture of Nick and I together up on her wall.

‘I always hoped you would go out with my Nick,’ she told me over and over again, making me feel really special and wanted.

One day Nick took me up to London for a trip on one of the tour buses. I fell completely in love and believed that I had finally found a way out of my terrible life.