Sarah's Story

by Sarah Preston

  I didn’t see Bill for almost a week, but I was too scared to be glad. I knew from past experience that he would soon be back.

  I hardly saw my mum over the next couple of months. She was too busy enjoying her new life with her boyfriend. I remember thinking at the time that she didn’t really miss me, and had never really loved me. If she had done, she would never have left me. She would still be here caring for me. Maybe, if she hadn’t deserted our family, I would have gained the strength and courage I needed from being with her to stand up and speak out about what was happening to me. Instead, I was shown how weak she was. She didn’t want to stay with Dad and work things out; she just decided to leave when things got wobbly at home.

  Instead of being loved, I remained frightened, rejected and unwanted. I was only a little girl. Why did my mum choose to walk out on me when I needed her the most?

  Inside my heart, I felt so very, very alone.

  Spring passed in what seemed like a few hours. I enjoyed spring, but there were of course parts of it that dragged like a never-ending cold winter’s day: those times I spent with Bill.

  Finally, summer arrived. I liked summer too – I enjoyed helping Dad in the garden on long, hot days. It was my responsibility to help the tomato plants in the greenhouse to cross-pollinate. I used to do this by tickling the flowers on each of the plants with a feather Dad had given me. I used to laugh when I thought about tickling the tomatoes – it always seemed a daft thing to do. I would fall asleep quickly at night – as I closed my eyes, I would hope for a sunny day tomorrow. At least then, when I got home from school, I could help Dad in the garden.

  Why do dreams shatter like glass before you get a chance to live them?

  For a few days, I had been aware of feeling somewhat uncomfortable around Dad. I would occasionally catch him watching me, looking at me for longer than he normally would, with a strange look in his eye. I began to sense something was wrong, and my young mind started working overtime. Was he tired of having me around? Was he going to leave me too, just like Mum?

  I was woken early one morning by Dad standing at the side of my bed. He was wearing nothing but his underpants. ‘Sshh,’ he whispered as he gathered me up into his arms. ‘Don’t make a sound, or you’ll wake Robert.’ My little brother was still asleep.

  What was wrong? I wondered. Had something happened? Was Mum back?

  Dad walked the short distance across the landing and carried me into his and Mum’s room. I looked at the bed expectantly, but soon realised that Mum wasn’t there after all. It had been an idle hope.

  Dad laid me on the bed, then climbed in beside me and kissed me on the cheek. I was still very sleepy, but I managed to say to him, ‘What are you doing, Dad?’

  He shushed me again.

  I very quickly realised what he was going to do as he wriggled in the bed beside me, taking down his pants.

  Oh, God. No! Not you too …

  I wept silent tears all the time my dad was touching me. I whimpered and gasped out when he pushed inside me, but by this time I was awake enough to notice the look on his face. It was a look of surprise: I hadn’t cried out, and he could tell that I wasn’t a virgin. He carried on regardless, unconcerned about who had taken his daughter’s innocence before him.

  Bill’s warning screamed inside my head. Would his warning become Dad’s warning too?

  I wanted to be free.

  I wanted to escape.

  I wanted to end my life.

  I wanted to die.

  I wanted to be an angel. No harm would come to an angel.

  My whole world had been falling apart for over a year, but now it was collapsing quicker than ever before. I heard voices in my head asking the same question over and over again.

  Why me?

  Why choose me?

  The words echoed inside my head, moving around like a carousel until finally I fell back asleep, sobbing and crying silently in my own bed after my father had carried me back there half an hour later.

  Seven

  I WOKE THE next morning in a world that had become even more of an unbearable dream, a world that my own father had invaded in a way that should never have happened. I knew that a father should be someone you look up to, someone who takes care of you, protects you and comforts you when you fall down or hurt yourself.

  A father should never look on his daughter as an object he desires, like he might a passing woman. Not even for a few short, stolen moments.

  He should not see his daughter as a substitute for the lover he can’t secure when his wife has left him.

  A father needs to be just that: a father, a friend to his children when they are at their lowest. Times like now. My father should have remained my friend. Instead, he crossed a boundary that had already been transgressed, a boundary that should have remained intact.

  My dad’s abuse only happened twice more.

  Only twice …

  I didn’t know what to do to make him stop. I couldn’t stop Bill. And now I couldn’t stop him.

  On the next two occasions when my father carried me gently, cradled in his arms like precious cargo, into his bed in the early hours of the morning before my brother woke in the next room, I still wept silently. But no one heard, and Dad didn’t stop. He didn’t even stop when he saw my tears falling on his pillow. My father only thought of himself. His needs, and his desire to do evil things to me rather than playing nicely with his daughter and taking care of me the way he should.

  When he had sex with me, I believed that, if I moved under him the way Bill had moved on top of me, he would be satisfied and leave me alone. But he didn’t. He started talking to me the same way Bill had, speaking in a low voice that sounded unfamiliar in his mouth.

  It didn’t sound like my dad. He had become a stranger.

  ‘You’ve done this before, haven’t you, Sarah?’ he asked me on one occasion.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I know you have. I can tell.’

  I hid my face by turning it into the pillow. I didn’t want him to see my lies, or for him to kiss me like he had done the time before.

  ‘I don’t like it, Dad,’ I slowly said to him. ‘Please stop.’

  But he just carried on moving up and down, grunting and groaning. He was heavy. I felt him press against my body in the same way Bill had. I wanted so desperately for it to stop. As my sobs grew louder, he angrily pulled himself off me then carried me back to my bed and left me sobbing into my pillow. He said nothing as he closed the door behind himself.

  He never, ever said, ‘I’m sorry, Sarah.’ Not that night. Not ever.

  When I was old enough to think it through, I blamed Mum for what happened with Dad, because she had been the one to leave us. I blamed her for not being a wife to him. Somehow I think I tried to avoid blaming him for anything. I don’t know why. But, when I look back and try to examine my thoughts and feelings about what happened to me all those years ago, I think I did blame him once, for a short time.

  I wanted to know why he had not helped me. He knew I had had sex. He knew someone had abused me, that someone had taken his little girl’s virginity. He found that out when he abused me in the same way. Yet he did nothing. He never came to rescue me.

  He couldn’t save me. If he had taken me to the police or to social services, he was in danger of being found out himself. He didn’t protect me because he was so busy protecting himself. And he must have known it was Bill who had abused me; there was no one else it could have been. But he stood by and did nothing.

  The daughter he once knew had gone forever, and he had helped with the abduction of her childhood.

  The weeks passed. Mum still only came to see us once a week, but Dad was talking to her more now. One day, he even asked her to come home, but she said no. He wasn’t happy, and that night he was still angry. I could see in his eyes that he was thinking through the events of the last few months, replaying the arguments they had had over and over again in his mind, wondering what he had done that had been
so bad that she had decided to leave him and – what was worse – move in with another man, sharing a bed that was not his.

  He wanted Mum to come home. He missed her. It was as if she had rejected him completely this time, and the challenge of another man who was living with his wife and receiving all her attention only made my father angrier.

  I wanted her to come home too, but for different reasons now: then, at least, Dad would stop taking me to his bed. After all, she was his wife, not me. Wasn’t it time she took back her role so that I could try and become a child again?

  At least if Mum came home I’d be safe from one lot of abuse.

  Wouldn’t I?

  As I lay in bed at night, I tried to make sense of everything that had happened between Mum and Dad. I listened intently when I heard Dad’s footsteps on the stairs, urgently hoping they wouldn’t stop at my door. I would breathe a sigh of relief when I heard his door close and again, a moment later, when his light switch flicked into the off position.

  I lay back down and continued to think about the mess I was caught up in.

  Why would she not come home?

  Who had done the most wrong in their marriage?

  Was it her for playing bingo too much and spending all their money?

  Or was it Dad and his temper?

  Why had he become so irate over the last few months?

  Why was my mother not spending time in my father’s bed?

  These questions climbed aboard the carousel that was already travelling through my mind fully laden with my other questions.

  I tossed and turned for hours until early the following morning when I finally slipped into an erratic, hazy sleep.

  One morning, Bill turned up earlier than ever to ask Dad if I could go and help him make sandwiches. I was furious when I saw him. What was he expecting? Extra time after his usual games? I didn’t want to go. I wanted to stay home – although why I wanted to stay home was beyond me.

  If I went with Bill, I’d get abused. If I stayed at home, I’d probably endure the same fate.

  Was there no way out? Was there no escape route out of this mess of a life? As I lay on my bed listening to their voices below me, I found my mind slowly drifting, asking yet more questions about myself. What was it about me that these older men found so interesting? Why did they want to do these horrible, unjust things to me? Surely it would have been more fun for them both if they had gone out and found a real woman each. Perhaps they were both afraid of women their own age. Or was it simpler than that? They both knew that women who were not attracted to them could easily reject them; but with children it was different. A child would never go against anything an adult did.

  I woke suddenly from my daydream to hear Dad’s voice in the kitchen. ‘Yes, course she can, Bill. She’ll be happy to help.’

  What was this? Paedophiles United? Had they both formed a club that I was a member of, but not considered worthy enough to have a vote? They never even asked me if I was willing to play. Dad had volunteered my ‘help’ to Bill. Yippee, I thought, time to get clean again. I can hardly contain myself.

  I wondered then if he would have volunteered me knowing what Bill had planned for me. I was still deep in thought a few minutes later in Bill’s car. Were they both unsure of me? Was Dad worried I would tell Bill what he had already done to me? Was Bill worried I may have told Dad about him? They both had reason to panic. After all, I was a bomb of information, information that could see them both sent to prison. Both of them held my secret, and I held both of theirs. But I couldn’t tell anyone about it – now more than ever, because if I did I would be left with a broken, torn world in which I would have to survive alone, unwanted and unloved.

  I had to come to terms with not being wanted. Mum had come back and taken Robert with her, but still I was left behind. Alone with Dad.

  Why didn’t she want me?

  Was I not good enough?

  Perhaps she knew what had happened to me?

  Was I too dirty now?

  Was I so bad that she hated me?

  Mum said she thought I’d prefer to stay with Dad, and that he should at least still have one of us there with him.

  She said she knew I was safe there.

  How wrong can a mother be?

  Some days my dad was wonderful, kind and considerate. A reminder of happier, more innocent times. Times that were lost forever, never to return. But other times I caught him watching me, and I knew it was only a matter of time before he would come back to my bedside again, haunting my waking moments more than ever.

  Dad and Bill had become quite an enterprising team while Mum had been away. Dad was growing lots of flowers and Bill was selling all the surplus ones for him at the bingo hall. Bill had always admired Dad’s chrysanthemums and dahlias in the garden and offered to sell some to friends and people he knew at the bingo. Dad was over the moon when Bill called back later that day with news for him: he wanted a further ten bunches of flowers in addition to the fifteen he had already taken and sold.

  As Dad was in such a good mood, Bill asked if I could help him do sandwiches for the snack bar again. Casually, Dad replied, ‘Yes.’

  Had Bill planed this? Was he really selling Dad’s flowers for him? Or was he paying to have his special treats with me? I felt like I was being bought and sold, not unlike the poor flowers that had been cut away from their secure stems, only to wither and die in a vase on a windowsill, away from the fresh air and the garden they knew as home.

  I ran into the bathroom and tried to vomit, but nothing happened. I was anxious for the sickness to start – at least that way I knew I would be safe. I put my finger down my throat but I couldn’t do it: I was too much of a coward to go the whole way.

  Dad had let me down yet again. He knew what Bill intended to do to me.

  Hadn’t he learned my awful secret the hard way? Hadn’t he found out the truth through his own abuse? Why hadn’t he stopped me going? Did he want Bill to touch me? Did he find pleasure in knowing Bill would be touching me?

  That afternoon, alone with Bill in his flat, I felt more secluded than I had ever been. This time he sat me on a chair by the fire. He got some of his magazines off the top of the tallest pile – this pile was half my height, such a lot of magazines – and opened one of them. He started to look at it while he rested his hand on my leg. He wanted me to look too, but I turned my head away.

  I didn’t like the pictures inside. All the ladies were either bare or just wearing some lacy knickers. I remember thinking they were very pretty, but why did they have their hands on their boobs? Why are they touching their bodies in those places? Bill smiled at me as he looked through the pages. He moved his hand up my leg and pulled off my pants. I wanted him to stop, but I knew there was no point asking any more. ‘Be quiet,’ he said, when I asked him to stop.

  He always did that.

  He always told me to be quiet, as if I had no rights, not even the right of speaking or hearing my own voice. He had a way of looking at me that made me very anxious; his eyes were warningly dark and unsettling. His gaze carried harm that told me he could hurt me more than he had already, if that was possible.

  He continued to look at the magazines the whole time I was there that day, and I knew I had to look too. Each time I tried averting my eyes, he just moved the magazine further across my lap so I couldn’t avoid it. I tried to move further away from the magazine but his hand held one of my legs and the chair arm crushed the other, making it impossible.

  He wanted me to talk to him, tell him what I thought about the images in the magazine. I stayed quiet when he asked me questions. I didn’t want to talk about these things. Bill always talked and he always made me feel intimidated and afraid when he spoke the way he did. I began to drift into another world, my secret, safe world that I didn’t let anyone else into. Is that what I’ll look like when I’m older? I found myself wondering when I saw a picture of a lady with her legs slightly open. I didn’t want to look like that. I didn’t want any
of it. It was yuck.

  Bill put the magazine down and picked up another one. He led me to his bed. I had to put his thing in my mouth like in the picture. I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to see it. I felt as if I was choking and my body began to shake. He pulled it out of my mouth and put his hand on to it, pulling the funny outer skin back and forth. Over and over again, he moved his hand, back and forth, back and forth. He groaned as he ejaculated all over me.

  I slid gently away in the hope that he wouldn’t feel the movement while he had his eyes closed. This way I didn’t get too much stuff on me. I hated him doing this. I wanted to fall through a hole in the floor and be swallowed up so that I didn’t exist and wouldn’t have been subjected to this vile, contemptible act of indecency.

  He took me home an hour later and picked up the flowers from Dad. Then he left.

  Eight

  I HAD HAD a particularly disturbing week.

  For any other child my age it should have been an ordinary time, when they would have been happy being a child, in their homes surrounded by their loving families. Spending time with their dads. I dreaded being alone with mine.

  What had happened to my loving family? Why, in such a short time, had my world been changed beyond recognition? Were my sisters, my brother and I to blame for our parents’ separation? Or was it just my fault? Was I being punished because I had done terrible things?

  I did still love my dad, but I hated the night-times. I found myself fearing the long, lonely hours alone in the house with Dad more than the abuse I constantly received from Bill. I just wanted a ‘normal’ dad, not this dad. This dad was a stranger. He had appeared in my life and replaced the father I knew so well when I was ten. The father that had cared for me so well in all the years before this one arrived had disappeared out of sight.