The Little Prisoner (6 page)

When he finally lifted the pillow he would squeeze my face painfully. ‘I fucking hate you,’ he would say, his face almost touching mine. ‘Everyone fucking hates you.’ He would then slap me a few times and press the pillow down again.

The only time he would let me get some air was when he thought I was about to pass out. He would check this by lifting my arm and letting it drop, so I learnt to go limp earlier, but he soon cottoned on to that and became angrier still.

I would usually become so frightened under those pillows that I would wet myself, which made him even more incensed, and he would push my face into it like a puppy, rubbing the wet sheet roughly against my skin to teach me a lesson. He’d tell Mum I’d wet the bed, which was why he was angry with me, so she would shout at me too. Sometimes, if she had been out, he would tell her he’d given me a drink which I’d spilled down myself, which would explain why I was in different pyjamas when she came home. That would give him another reason to hit me and shout angrily, and then he would do it all again.

Because the suffocating happened nearly every night I tried different tricks to try to make it better. I would lie on my side when I heard him coming up the stairs, because I found I could breathe more easily that way, and then I decided I could get more air through the mattress than through the pillow, so I would lie on my front, sometimes putting the pillow over my head in readiness for the attack. Richard realized what I was doing quite soon and would put another pillow under my face so that there was no escape. The only thing I could do was stay as still as possible and take shallow breaths. Instinctively I worked out that if I lay quite still it would make it less exciting for him and he was more likely to become bored. I half-hoped that he would succeed in killing me, but he was too cunning for that, always pulling back at the last minute.

It was worse when Mum went out, but sometimes he would even do it when she was downstairs. But there were some tortures, or ‘games’ as he preferred to call them, which he was happy to inflict on me whoever was around. There were ‘thumb jobs’, for instance, which entailed him bending my thumb down as far as he could until I was crying out from the pain. That was one he would do for laughs. Another was to make me spread my fingers out on a wooden surface and he would stab a sharp kitchen knife down in between them at faster and faster speeds to show how accurate and fast his reflexes were. Once he carried this further by throwing a paint scraper at my feet so that it sliced between my toes, pinning them to the floor.

If Mum was in the house he might leave me alone after the suffocation game, but if she was out it would just be the start of his night’s entertainment.

‘Come out here,’ he would say once he was bored with the pillow trick, and I would obediently make my way out into the hallway, knowing what was coming.

The ritual was more or less the same each time for many years. He would strip his clothes off and bend over the top few stairs.

‘Lick my arse,’ he would instruct me and I would reluctantly make my way up to him. I would start by licking his cheeks, hoping he would let me get away with that. That was bad enough, but I always knew it wouldn’t be enough for him.

‘Lick the hole!’ he would snarl at me angrily, and I would have to do it, however sick and humiliated it made me feel. Then he would make me push my finger into it as hard as I could. I guess my finger wasn’t big enough to reach wherever he wanted me to reach, though, because then he would often do it to himself.

These nights always had to end with him giving me oral sex and me masturbating him. If Mum was out for the whole night, he would keep the ‘games’ going for hours. Sometimes he would want me to smack his bum and tell him he was a naughty boy. Sometimes he would make me go on all fours, with my arms and legs straight, and he would rub his penis around my back and front entrances, pushing into my back entrance. The force of his weight would make me move away even if I tried not to, which wasn’t what he wanted, so he would take me downstairs to the sofa so I couldn’t move. At other times he would lay me across his lap with my knickers down, or off completely, and smack, bite, kiss or play with my bottom and my vagina.

‘I can’t stand to look at your fucking ugly face!’ he’d tell me, and I would have to kneel with my face pressed against his bottom and put my arm through his legs to masturbate him. Or he would sit me on his lap and wriggle me around, telling me to keep the movements going myself.

When he was performing oral sex on me I would try to disconnect myself from my body, distracting my mind by counting things like the patterns on the wallpaper or the digits on the clock counter on the video. If the television was on I would close my eyes and spell out the things that people were saying and count the letters in my head, anything to keep my mind busy so that I didn’t have to think about what he was doing to me. Sometimes he would shout at me to move my bottom up and down or to pull his hair while he was doing it and masturbating himself.

If my brothers were upstairs in their bedrooms, they knew better than to come out for any reason. God knows how much they heard or understood of the night-time noises outside their closed doors.

Although Richard fought with everyone he came into contact with, bullying everyone, regardless of their age or gender, I don’t think there was anyone else that he degraded sexually in the way that he degraded me. Everyone in the area hated him, though, and they didn’t much like the way my mum carried on either. All day long I would be sent out to knock on doors and cadge cigarettes, teabags, washing powder or anything else that she needed and couldn’t be bothered to go out and buy for herself.

The neighbours must have been able to watch me going from door to door. I bet sometimes they would avoid answering my knock. ‘Oh, Janey,’ they would say in despairing voices when I came back with my fifth request of the day. They all knew they would never be paid back for anything that was borrowed.

Although they spent a fortune doing up their houses, Mum and Richard never had enough money for the essentials of life. Mum would always buy a cheap toilet roll on a Monday when she got her giro cheque, but with seven people in the house it was gone by Tuesday and we would be using torn up newspapers for the rest of the week. I got into the habit of filling my pockets with tissues wherever I came across them. I stole a toilet roll from school once and Mum told me to get more, but I made up some excuse as to why I couldn’t. Every time I went out of the house Mum would say, ‘Try and get some toilet roll.’ I couldn’t understand how she and Richard could afford to smoke and eat McDonald’s, Chinese and curries, but not to buy the basic decencies of life.

Sometimes if Mum had run out of cigarettes and the giro wasn’t due I would have to go out with one of my little brothers and scour the streets for dog-ends, so she could take the tobacco out and make roll ups. I had to keep it a secret from Richard, because he would have gone mad if he’d known we were showing ourselves up like that. I was so ashamed I would tell my friends we were looking for stones, but they knew perfectly well what we were doing. They were always very kind to me. I think they felt sorry for me, having to live with Richard.

Everyone was meant to believe that Richard didn’t work, which he didn’t for years. Then he started doing shifts as a mini-cab driver, but didn’t want to give up the disability benefit he received for his ‘bad leg’, so the work had to be kept quiet. He would unscrew the aerial from the roof of the car whenever he came home and cover up the two-way radio. He would even use a walking stick sometimes, particularly if he’d noticed a new car in the street and thought social services were spying on him. If they had spied on him they would have been able to see him building sheds, laying patios and doing up houses with no trouble at all, not to mention beating people up when they annoyed him.

We were always under strict instructions to lie to anyone who asked about him and to act as if he were really poorly. My friends would always tell me that everyone knew what he was up to, but no one wanted to accuse him to his face.

He even went to the trouble of having handrails fitted in the bathroom so that he could claim a higher level of welfare payment. ‘I hate having those fucking ugly things in my house,’ he would complain, but he was happy to do anything that would bring in a bit more easy money.

I would have to make plenty of trips to the shops as well as to neighbours’ houses during the average day, always sent on the spur of the moment and my journey timed to make sure I didn’t take any detours and meet up with a friend or play with the other kids who messed about in the car park which was a couple of doors away.

Sometimes, however, things would go wrong. One day, for instance, when I was still small, I was sent to get Richard some cigarettes and a few other things.

‘Don’t be long,’ he warned, and I could see he was in a bad mood.

I hurried down the road and got to the shop in record time, but the people behind the counter wouldn’t sell me cigarettes and so I knew I was going to have to stand outside as usual asking other customers to buy them for me. That could sometimes take ages, as most people would refuse. This particular day it took what seemed like hours and I was becoming increasingly agitated. If I went back without them I would be in trouble, but if I took too long Richard would think I’d gone to play with a friend, disobeying his orders. It looked as if there was going to be no way out of getting a smack at the very least.

Eventually a man came along who lived opposite us and I begged him to help me, promising that I was buying the cigarettes for my parents. He seemed to believe me, got the cigarettes for me and then asked if I wanted a lift home. We’d been told never to accept lifts from strange men, but I often played with this man’s daughters and knew his wife. There didn’t seem to be any danger and I was eager to get back as quickly as possible in the hope of avoiding a punishment, so I accepted his offer, assuming he would park in the car park round the corner and my stepfather wouldn’t see me getting out of the car. To my horror, however, the neighbour, presumably thinking he was doing me a favour, dropped me off right outside the house. As I came in through the front door Richard went berserk, shouting and screaming, hitting me around the head and kicking me.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ I kept saying over and over again, but I couldn’t make him stop.

‘Stand against the backroom window,’ he ordered, ‘and put your arms down by your sides.’

There was no one else in the house to intervene. I did as he told me, terrified of what new torture he might have thought up but equally terrified of moving and angering him still further. So when he pulled back his fist I didn’t flinch, taking the punch full in the face.

‘You deserve that,’ he shouted, finally happy that he had taught me a lesson. ‘Never get in anyone’s car again.’

As the boys grew older my duties towards them increased. I didn’t mind that too much because I loved them when they were little and they were very affectionate back. The younger ones used to call me ‘Mum’ a lot of the time, which would make me laugh. I liked it when they did that; it made me feel they were grateful for what I did for them.

Richard kept wanting more children because he was trying to have a girl of his own. Even when Mum got ill and lost a kidney, he insisted that they went on trying.

Mum and Richard would stay in bed in the mornings once I was able to get the others up and sort out their breakfasts. I was always turning up at school with safety pins all over my clothes from changing nappies.

If the boys woke up early they would come into my room. All of us were terrified of making a noise and disturbing the sleeping adults. To entertain them and keep them quiet until it was time for breakfast I would sit them in a line and dress them up in my clothes, doing their hair as if they were my dolls. They loved it, but when Richard found out he went mad, saying I was trying to turn them into ‘poofs’. If Mum got up, Silly Git would stay in bed and I would be sent up to give him cups of tea. On each trip I would have to do him some horrible little ‘favour’. He would make me come right up to the edge of the bed, lifting up my skirt and tugging my knickers down so that he could touch me. I would then have to play with him under the covers for a few minutes until Mum called me back downstairs again.