The Little Prisoner (9 page)

‘Do it properly,’ he ordered, pushing my head towards him, making me gag but giving me no chance to disengage.

When I’d done it enough he took it out of my mouth and masturbated himself in front of me. We then went back downstairs to rejoin the others and continue cleaning the car as if we were one big happy family.

The sexual abuse itself was never enough for him, he always had to wrap it up in some sort of psychological torture which he would pretend was a game that we were both enjoying.

One day, for instance, when everyone else was out, he called me to the top of the stairs.

‘You owe me a favour,’ he told me. ‘So you can have a choice of how to repay me.’

The choice, it seemed, was him giving me oral sex, me doing it for him or me kissing him on the lips. I’d never had to kiss him before and I thought that would be the least disgusting of the three options. At least he wouldn’t be touching me anywhere private.

Once I had chosen the kiss he told me that I was going to have to put my tongue in his mouth. I thought I was going to die. I tried to do it so he wouldn’t become angry, but it just made me gag. Because it was so disgusting, even worse than the oral sex, I couldn’t do it properly and he became furious, making me do all three things as a punishment for doing it badly.

Thinking about it afterwards, I realized it had been a trick all along and that he had always intended to make me do everything. Any ‘games’ involving ‘choices’ were just that, games. I would always be the loser, so in the future I might as well choose the worst option first in the hope of getting it over and done with as quickly as possible.

When you’re a small child you sort of assume that your life is normal, that everyone else is going through much the same experiences as you are. The first indication I had that perhaps this wasn’t so was when I was out playing with one of my friends and she said she was going to go home.

‘But your mum’s out,’ I said, genuinely surprised by her decision.

‘It’s okay, my dad’s there,’ she replied, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and I realized that she wasn’t actually frightened of being in the house on her own with her father. Was it possible that her dad never hurt her? Was I the only one who was being made to do these things? How could I find out when I had been told that Mum and I would be killed if I ever discussed such private matters with anyone else?

Eventually I mustered the courage to confide what was happening to me to my friend Hayley, having absolutely sworn her to secrecy and extracted a secret from her first in order to secure her discretion.

At first she couldn’t understand what I was trying to tell her.

‘You know,’ I said when she looked puzzled, ‘he makes me do the sort of things that married couples do.’

She was horrified and immediately wanted to tell her mum so that he could be stopped. I reminded her of her vow and of the secret I was holding of hers. I warned her I would have to kill myself if she breathed a word and she saw that I was serious. She thought for a while.

‘As he’s not your real dad,’ she suggested eventually, ‘perhaps you could just pretend you’re having an affair.’

‘I don’t want to have an affair with him!’ I wailed and from the look on her face I think she was able to understand my pain, even if she wasn’t completely able to understand what was happening to me, and knew that she could never breathe a word until I was ready. She was the best friend I could possibly have asked for. But even though I knew I could trust her, I still had rushes of panic when I thought about what would happen if she ever let my secret slip out. The next time Silly Git asked me to do something horrible I plucked up all my courage and complained that Hayley didn’t have to do that sort of thing for her dad.

‘How do you know?’ he demanded, instantly suspicious.

‘I don’t know,’ I backtracked quickly, knowing how terrible the retribution would be if he thought I’d told anyone about what happened between us. ‘I can just tell she doesn’t.’

‘You ever tell her anything and I’ll kill you,’ he promised, and I had no reason to doubt it.

Hayley and I were as inseparable as we could be, considering how little I was allowed out of the house. Whenever I was given permission we used to play rounders or skate in the car park round the corner or sit playing cards in the tourer caravan that Granddad kept parked in his drive. Even then, however, my freedom had limits. When the other kids got tired of staying in the car park and wanted to go round the block, Hayley would always stay with me, knowing I wasn’t allowed to go any further from the house. Sometimes, if Richard was off mini-cabbing for a few hours and Hayley’s mum was in with my mum, she would plead, ‘Oh, let her go with the others,’ and Mum wouldn’t be able to think up any reason why I shouldn’t be treated just like them, so I was allowed to go, but this didn’t happen often.

Knowing that she couldn’t come knocking on my door and that most of the time I was forbidden to knock on hers, Hayley used to sit on a wall just out of sight of our windows, waiting for me to come past on one of my dozens of trips to the shop every day. She never had long to wait and we would chatter all the way there and back, with her peeling off at the last corner so that Mum and Richard wouldn’t see us together and think I’d disobeyed orders and knocked for her as I’d passed. We became ‘blood sisters’ on the grass outside a block of flats in our street, picking scabs off our knees and rubbing them together so our blood would mingle. She would eventually prove to be as true and faithful as any blood sister could be, putting herself and her family in considerable danger in order to speak up for me.

Hayley’s mum was pretty friendly with mine and one evening when my stepdad was off mini-cabbing, she came over to our house for a smoke and a chat and they sent me back to Hayley’s house to babysit her little brother and sister with her. Once the little children were in bed, we decided to raid the drinks cupboard and found her mum’s bottle of Malibu, plus a few others, and pretended to each other that we were getting roaring drunk as we took swigs from each bottle.

When Hayley’s mum returned unexpectedly and said I had to go back because my dad had come home early, I felt sick with fear in case he worked out what I’d been up to. I had no idea I had actually become drunk until my head hit the fresh air and I tried to get back across the road to our house and found myself ricocheting off every car in the street.

Part of my brain was sober enough to know that if Richard realized I was drunk I would be in big trouble. I made a huge effort to make my movements and voice seem normal. Before going into the house I took a deep breath and tried to compose myself, but all that happened was that a terrible urge rose inside me to giggle, which I knew would earn me a good beating because my stepdad wouldn’t be able to understand what I was laughing at. I took a few more seconds and then let myself into the house. I took off my shoes and socks so that I didn’t make any marks or leave any fluff on the carpet and popped my head round the door to the front room to see what the mood was like.

Richard and Mum were both there and Richard was sitting in his armchair eating the four egg mayo sandwiches that Mum always packed in his lunchbox when he worked nights, ready for him when he came home. It was a large lunchbox and I could see it quite clearly as I walked into the room. It was on the floor and there was plenty of space to walk round it, but for some reason my bare feet weren’t obeying my brain. It was as if they were being pulled by a magnet towards those soft moist sandwiches. I stood frozen in fear as I felt them squelch beneath my toes, waiting for the explosion.

‘You been drinking?’ they both asked, laughing.

For some reason I didn’t get into any trouble, just had to peel the sandwiches off the soles of my feet and go to bed. The next morning they made me apologize to Hayley’s mum for stealing her drink. She thought it was all a big laugh.

It was strange how sometimes things that I would have thought would get me in trouble were no problem at all. It was as if all the normal rules of good parenting had been turned on their heads. It was always impossible to tell when Mum and Richard would find something funny and allow me to laugh too. It was as if I needed to have their permission to laugh and if I did it without permission they would think I was being cheeky or laughing at them and I would get a wallop. It was all very confusing.

One of Richard’s favourite places to take me was the loft. There was no ladder, which made it difficult to get to and unlikely that my mother or anyone else would disturb us without us hearing them coming. There were no lights either, and no boards on the floor, just a few bits of wood at one end.

Richard would tell Mum we were going up to look for something or other, climbing up from the banister and pulling me up after him, lighting a candle or matches and making a few rustling noises to let her think he was searching for something. When we got to the far end he would get out some pornographic magazines and look at them while stroking my chest and private parts and making me masturbate him. If Mum disturbed us by shouting up to find out what was keeping us, or if I hadn’t done a good enough job, or if I had a miserable expression on my face, he would blow out the candle and leave me up there on my own, telling Mum I was being moody or sulky and needed to be taught a lesson.

I hated it up there in the dark amidst the spiders and God knows what else. I would sit at the edge of the hatch looking down at what seemed an impossibly long drop.

‘If you want to get down, then jump,’ Richard would taunt, ‘or else you can stay up there all fucking day!’

He would eventually get me down because Mum would start moaning at him.

Sometimes when Mum had gone out to Bingo and he knew she was going to be some time, he would bring the magazines downstairs and make me re-enact what the women in the pictures were doing and read out loud the words that were written in the bubbles coming out of their mouths. He would get cross if I did it wrong. If the boys were in the house they knew better than to come out of their rooms once they’d been sent to bed.

One day Mum went up to the loft herself when Richard was out mini-cabbing and she needed some clothes. I begged her not to, but couldn’t give her any good reason why not. I stood helplessly on the landing as she fetched a chair and hoisted herself up. I could see through the hatch that she was rooting around in the area where he kept the magazines. As she came back down onto the chair she had them in her hand. She asked me what they were doing up there and I could feel myself turning bright red with shame.

‘I don’t know,’ I muttered guiltily.

What made her think that I knew anything about them? Why would she imagine that a little girl would be storing pornography in the loft, unless she suspected the truth?

When Richard got home she showed him the magazines. ‘Look what that dirty bastard left in the loft when he moved out,’ she said, referring to the previous owner of the house. ‘I knew there was something dodgy about him.’

‘Disgusting,’ Richard agreed. ‘I wouldn’t want anything to do with filth like that.’

I have no idea if Mum believed him or not, but it certainly wouldn’t have been a good idea for her to express any doubts if she had them.

Life continued as if nothing had happened.

Chapter Four

I
  always wanted to believe that Mum knew nothing about what was going on. No child wants to believe that their mother knows they are suffering and chooses to do nothing about it. Because I knew how much she suffered at Richard’s hands as well, I put her on a pedestal and was always determined to protect her if ever I could. I believed that if I let her know what was going on, I would be putting both our lives in danger. I would never forget the feel of that carving knife on my throat and I never doubted for a moment that Richard was capable of carrying out his threat to murder her if I said anything.

When I got older Mum and I used to go out shopping together, giggling all the time, and she liked to believe that people were looking at us and thinking we were sisters. Although she let me down a lot by not protecting me from Richard when she could have done, I still thought the world of her. One of the bonds between us was woven from my knowledge of what he did to her.