by Lisa James
It was still routine to see Dad’s penis on display. In summer he’d wear very short white swimming trunks and often his genitals would be hanging out of the side. He’d kick a balloon or ball to me and every time he raised his leg he’d expose himself. Either that or he’d sit with his legs apart blatantly scratching his scrotum, but Mum would never say ‘Put it away, Frank. Everyone can see,’ as a normal mother or wife would do.
It was around this time that he began instigating more and more physical games with me. Wrestling remained a favourite. He would pin me down with my arms above my head and lie on top of me, forcing my legs apart with his knees. Mum would be in and out of the room with cups of tea or cans of lager for Dad, and she often witnessed him grinding his hips between my open legs but she never said a word.
I was starting to wonder whether he was touching my bum and chest on purpose, but despite his previous lewd behaviour with pornography and nudity, and what he had done to himself in my bedroom when he thought I was asleep, a part of me couldn’t quite believe he meant it in a rude way. He was my dad. We were only playing a wrestling game, and Mum was often in the room. Besides, I’d seen Giant Haystacks grip Big Daddy in a private place on the telly, but there was never any question that he was doing it on purpose, or being rude. Dad was my dad, and although I squirmed with embarrassment when he squeezed my buttocks or chest, I felt bad for having suspicions about his motives.
One day he had my face in a headlock between his thighs. My face was pressed into his groin and I felt the familiar hardness beneath his scruffy jeans. Mum was sitting in the armchair, flicking through the Reader’s Digest. I couldn’t breathe and just wanted to get away, so I screamed as loudly as I could. Dad released me quickly and rolled away, knocking his eye into the edge of the coffee table. A lump began to form. I braced myself for a smack but on this occasion it never came. Instead, he just looked at me with a shocked expression, as if my loud scream had surprised him somehow. He was used to getting his own way, and I could tell he didn’t like the fact I’d resisted.
Most of Dad’s games involved some sort of physical contact: playing horsy with me on his back, wheelbarrows where my skirt would fall over my head exposing my knickers, rugby tackling or drenching me with water in the garden so that my thin summer clothes became transparent. Although I felt uncomfortable at times, I was so grateful not to be on the receiving end of Dad’s violence or bad temper that my overriding emotion was one of relief. I tried to smile, blotting out the parts I didn’t like, and pretended he was Pa Ingalls playing an innocent game in the sunshine with Half-Pint.
I was eleven and a half when an alarm bell rang in my head which I could no longer deny. I was lying on the floor on my tummy, in the classic children’s pose, watching cartoons. The room was dark and Dad was lying at my feet. Usually we both sat on the sofa with his legs on top of me, so it felt like a special occasion for me to be lying free on the floor. In a strange role reversal, he began to stroke my feet, tickling one minute, massaging deep the next. It felt lovely, and I realised why he had become addicted to me stroking his.
After some time his hand moved up to my calf. I was wearing a very loose pair of grey corduroy trousers, which had once belonged to Mum. The television provided the only light in the room. Mum was downstairs with Kat, as usual, and Dad and I were alone. One minute he was stroking my leg and I was enjoying the feeling, then suddenly he reached his hand higher under my trousers and began to stroke the back of my thigh just beneath my bottom. I stiffened as I realised he couldn’t possibly have run his fingertips under the elastic of my knickers by accident. It was as if a lightbulb had gone off in my head. I began to put everything together: all the lewd remarks, the touching and the rude behaviour. I knew then that when he exposed an erection, or played a pornographic video instead of Quincy QC, as he had done recently, it was on purpose. I remembered Cheryl complaining to her friend Gail about him always trying to touch her up and I felt a sense of paralysis come over me. For the first time ever, I understood about Dad and what he liked to do and I was shocked.
The fear came next. As soon as I could manage without upsetting him, I left the room and ran up to my bedroom where I lay on my bed and cried tears of confusion and hopelessness. What could I do? I knew without asking that Mum would be no help.
Over the next few days I began to think of finding Nanny and Jenny. I wondered if they thought about me and, if so, why they never wrote. I wondered where Diane, Cheryl and Davie had gone? If only I could contact them, they might let me go and live with them. Every time Dad stared at me now, I worried that he could read my mind and would know that I was being a ‘betraying bastard’. I had seen in a letter that Nanny and Jenny had moved to Kent, to a place called Tunbridge Wells, but I couldn’t remember their address apart from the number 10. I had been trained for so long to put all thoughts of them out of my mind that I couldn’t think of the street name. Did it begin with an A or a C?
I felt sad when I realised that even if I could remember their address I wouldn’t know what to do. It would be too embarrassing to talk to them about Dad and the rude things he was doing. All I knew was that I wanted to be with people who were clean, not dirty. I wanted people who loved me in a normal way, like the parents I saw walking with their children around the supermarket, but already I felt somehow contaminated. If I ever found Nanny again, she might look at me and see the shame and embarrassment that was beginning to leak from every pore. She might think I was dirty like Dad and not love me any more. It was better to remember her the way she had been in the past than to see her disappointed face now. I decided to forget about her and the rest of my family forever.
All I could do was try to keep away from Dad as much as possible, but it was very difficult because he became obsessed with knowing my every movement. He always wanted me near him. If I asked if I could go out with a friend from school, Dad made it clear that he would class it as an act of betrayal. He only had to spit in my cornflakes or call me a name like stupid prat, little piss-arsed fucker, ugly cunt or fat bitch, and I’d decide I didn’t want to go out after all.
Mum was no comfort whatsoever. Her favourite expression was ‘She’s not boo-hooing again, is she? Does it ever stop?’
Dad wanted to control every aspect of my life: where I went, what I did, where I sat, yet because of his violent mood swings, I was still disproportionately grateful whenever he was nice to me. I tried hard not to do anything wrong as I lived in fear of his mood changing. He demanded that I spend every spare minute with him and this habit was well entrenched by now. The only respite I ever got was during the day at school, or if I volunteered to go cleaning with Mum. That’s why, from the age of eleven and a half, I made sure I was doing a lot more cleaning. I knew she wouldn’t take my side against Dad, but if I stayed close to her he wouldn’t be able to do anything, would he?
Chapter Nine
The contacts Mum and Dad had made while cleaning for media companies in the West End had led to them securing the cleaning contract for a large new office building in Kensington, which had apparently cost millions to renovate. It was a mass of marble, smoked glass, chrome and shag-pile carpets. Every morning at 3.30am the alarm would go off and Mum would drag herself out of bed and get ready to catch the bus. If Dad was sober enough he would go with her, mainly to supervise the cash-in-hand cleaners they employed on a casual basis. Dad would come home at 8.30am, by which time I would have fed and dressed Kat and be ready to walk her to nursery. Mum wouldn’t get back until noon, having spent the morning dispensing tea bags and toilet rolls to every floor of the huge building. In the evening she would be off out again to take care of another couple of cleaning jobs in an advertising agency and an insurance broker’s. I often went with her to lend a hand on the evening jobs. Although I would have preferred to do my homework or watch telly, I knew that if I stayed at home I would be left with Dad and he might start to touch me again.
I began to look forward to going cleaning. I’d look at the people in
the town centre, all finished work for the day, and I imagined the normal lives they were going home to. I knew by this time that my life was anything but normal.
Unfortunately, going cleaning with mum every evening wasn’t enough to save me from Dad’s attentions. When we got back around 9pm, he would usually be watching the little portable television in his bedroom upstairs. Kat would already be in bed asleep, and while Mum made herself a couple of tea, she would flick on the television in the dining room and settle down for a couple of hours until bed. Dad would call out for me, and I had no choice but to go up to his bedroom to see what he wanted.
‘Come and sit beside me,’ he’d say. ‘You’ll like this programme.’
Once when I said I would rather watch it downstairs, he launched himself out of bed naked and grabbed me by the hair. ‘What am I, black or something, you cunt?’
Racism came as naturally to him as breathing. I’d had a Jamaican school friend called Janet for a while but when she came to pick me up at our front door, she heard Dad shouting ‘Tell that coon to fuck off back to the jungle. Fucking golly-wog.’ Understandably the friendship didn’t last long after that, although her mother was still very friendly to me if we passed on the street.
There was never any way out of the situation, so I had to go upstairs and sit on top of the bedcovers watching telly with him, or playing a game like I-Spy. He could be so nice when he wanted to be that it was almost hard to reconcile the nice dad with the nasty dad. When he was nice, it was hard to believe he could ever be nasty, and when he was nasty it was almost worth it to have him be nice for a while after. But then things took another twist.
‘Why not put your nightie on so you’re nice and comfy?’ he suggested. I didn’t want to but rather than risk angering him, I pulled on my long blue nightie but kept on a T-shirt underneath so that I wasn’t showing my bare arms or the ‘V’ that dipped at my chest.
Soon he began to insist that I wore my nightie every night and this became the new routine.
‘Get under the covers or you’ll get cold,’ he said next.
Once I was lying beside him under the duvet, he stopped asking me to do his feet. Instead he would turn away from me onto his side and demand I ‘do’ his back. I would have to stroke him for ages and it was much worse than doing his feet. My arm would be shaking with the effort of keeping it raised and in motion. Periodically he’d bark out orders such as ‘Lower!’ or ‘Over my ribs!’ If I didn’t do it right, he might grab my hand and guide it with his own, such an edge creeping into his voice that I’d try to make more of an effort. I’d have to sweep down low over the tops of his buttocks and up again around his ribs and chest. He’d shiver and get goosebumps, and that’s how I knew I was doing it right. If my arm got tired or I was slap-dash and my touch wasn’t light enough, he’d get really angry. He was fond of pinching me, giving a sharp little twist at the end that always left a nasty bruise.
But when I did the stroking right he’d compliment me on having the lightest touch he’d ever felt. He said nobody could stroke him as well as I could. I was happy to please him because it meant not getting hurt. I would have much rather been doing something else like any other child my age but, as always, I’d do anything so he wouldn’t be angry.
When it was time for me to go to bed, I climbed out from under the covers and bent down to give him a kiss goodnight. I would pretend he was like any other dad, not violent or peculiar in any way, and when he gave me a kiss on the cheek and a big cuddle, I felt happy. But more often than not he would then pull me down on top of him, and without the jeans and the belt buckle to blame it on, it was obvious he had an erection. I was confused and distressed at first, but it soon became so common that I didn’t think anything of it.
One night, just after my twelfth birthday, he pulled me on top of him, still above the duvet while he was naked underneath, and he ran his hands up and down my body in a way he’d never done before. It was almost frenzied, and as he cupped my buttocks in both his hands and pushed his erection into my stomach, his fingers pressed between my legs so hard that it hurt. I winced in pain, trying hard to disguise my discomfort. There was no way I could lie to myself and pretend it wasn’t happening. Once he’d started this new thing, he began to do it every night.
Once Mum walked into the bedroom with a cup of tea while I was lying on top of him with his fingers between my legs, and I looked up, alarmed. What would she say? Surely she couldn’t approve of him doing this? But as quickly as she’d come into the room, she backed out again, her face giving no clue about her feelings. By this time I knew she was aware of Dad’s preoccupation with me, and rather than hit him over the head with a frying pan, as many women would be driven to do, she felt challenged. She seemed to feel that she and Kat were battling with me for Dad’s attention and the thing she neglected to recognise was that I didn’t want his attention–especially not the sort he was starting to give me.
Every night thereafter Dad would go through the same goodnight routine. It went on night after night with me stroking his back, and then the hands running up and down my body. It became more usual for Dad to ‘accidentally’ play a pornographic video in front of me. He would always laugh as he heard me gasp in embarrassment. Soon he started to stroke my legs under the duvet. At first it felt nice and it was a relief to be able to relax and not feel the pain in my arms, but as much as I tried to paint the situation in an innocent light to myself, I couldn’t get away from the fact that it was odd to watch TV alone in bed with your dad.
I lay beside him in my nightie feeling very vulnerable. Tears stung my eyes as I felt his hands move up from the sides of my legs to the tops, and then circle their way down until he grabbed the inner sides of my thighs and lifted them apart. I was paralysed, unable to move. Before long, things took another, very frightening turn as, gradually, Dad began touching me between the legs. He would start by stroking the side of my leg. He’d do this for a few days and then the next time he would move to the inside of my leg. The next time he would part my legs to get better access to my inner thighs. All this would happen without any words being exchanged. And on it went very slowly so that by the time he actually made contact with my genitals, it was as though the situation had crept up on me without my realising. But as soon as he first brushed my knickers with his little finger, as if by accident, I realised that this moment had been building up for what seemed like years, and the things I had secretly been worried about, feeling guilty and dirty for even thinking them, had finally happened. I wanted to pull away but I was too petrified to move, not only because I feared his violence but also because if I was wrong and it was all innocent, he’d know I had been thinking rude things. He would think I had a filthy mind.
By the time there was no question as to what he was doing, because he was using his whole hand to touch me firmly on the genitals, I felt it was too late to do anything. I felt complicit in some way and I was absolutely distraught and confused. The only way I could cope was to pretend it wasn’t part of the ‘real world’. It was like a dream that wasn’t actually happening. I’d try and think of other things to keep my brain occupied.
The abuse was carried out in eery silence with the sound of the telly in the background and his occasional panting breaths. Soon, although things were still unspoken between us, he became more confident and rougher in the way he touched me. It used to hurt and I began to get very sore. I would lie there, hardly daring to breathe and certainly not brave enough to complain about the pain. I could feel the bed vibrating as he masturbated himself with his other hand. I imagined jumping up and saying goodnight before retreating to the safety of my room, but invariably I couldn’t help imagining Dad running after me, and the beating that would follow, and that was enough to keep me pinned to the bed. I wanted to move and protest, but incredibly I was still hoping that it was innocent.
If Katrina wasn’t already in bed, Mum would bring her up to say goodnight. She could see I was under the duvet with Dad, and that he was naked.
I was often on the brink of tears but she would just tut and roll her eyes. I tried to catch her eye and make her understand that I didn’t want to be there, that I hated it, but she’d never look at me directly. Despite the fact she had to get up in the early hours of the morning, she never asked me to go to bed so that she could take my place beside Dad. She always waited downstairs until she heard that he had let me go back to my room.
Sometimes the session would finish with Dad jerking and groaning, and at other times he would simply stop. That would be my cue to leave, without a backward glance or a word spoken. I’d simply go to my room and for the first few months I’d cry every night as I wondered what I had done to make this horrible thing happen to me.
Most nights after Dad had finished abusing me, I’d hear him and Mum having sex. There was no escaping the sound. It seemed as though Mum moaned and groaned especially loudly, as if she wanted me to hear her. I felt nauseous, because even at that age I had a very clear understanding that Dad’s abuse of me had somehow made him excited and now he was releasing his excitement with Mum. It felt incestuous and wrong and horrible.
One night, Dad had been abusing me as usual and when I went to bed, I noticed blood had soaked my knickers. I had started my periods. Burning with embarrassment, I called Mum to my room and showed her my knickers.
She seemed just as awkward and embarrassed as me, and refused to make eye contact. ‘Wait a minute while I get you some things,’ she said to the floor, before disappearing and returning a minute later to chuck two sanitary towels on my bed.