Mummy Knew

by Lisa James

  For the next few days, Dad teased me mercilessly about how all the dogs would be sniffing round me. I blushed as he said ‘She’s a woman now.’

  He began commenting regularly on my looks and developing body. He still liked kicking, punching or spitting at me, but the rest of the time he was telling me I looked beautiful and admiring the curve of my bottom in jeans. He would make me try on clothes and tell me to turn this way and that while he admired them.

  ‘Doesn’t she look beautiful, Donna?’ he would say, and Mum would grunt and turn away. Once I caught the look in her eye and I could have sworn it was one of pure hatred.

  Chapter Ten

  By the time I started secondary school, Dad’s abuse of me had been going on for months. I had almost grown used to it, and whenever his hand strayed between my legs I would tune out, and think about something else until it was over. It was this, and the fact we didn’t speak about the abuse, that made it seem as though it wasn’t really happening.

  On my first day at school, I remember feeling like the odd one out for a number of reasons. It wasn’t just that all the other girls had the official school blazers and were dropped off on their first day by one or other of their parents, but also because I felt tainted by the fact that Dad, the only dad I had ever known, was doing things to me most evenings that he shouldn’t have been doing. I wasn’t concerned that I was scruffy and lacking the required pencil case and geometry set listed in the school prospectus. These were minor considerations compared to what was going on at home.

  Dad had taken me to the school shop in Victoria and made a great fuss about ordering me the whole uniform. ‘I hope you know how much this shit is costing me,’ he growled in my ear as the bespectacled sales assistant took my measurements. By the time the final balance was due a week before school started, he had blown the money on a horse race so I had to make do with a grey jumper and skirt from down the market. Things like that didn’t really bother me. I had grown used to being the scruffiest kid in any class so it was all par for the course. It was the situation at home that caused me the most distress.

  On that first day, I was half an hour late, and arrived red-faced and sweating, having run all the way. Mum was out at work so I had to waken Kat, get her washed and dressed and walk her to nursery as I always did. The only difference now was that my new school was much further away. This meant I had to sprint, puffing and panting, all the way up a hill to get to my school. When I arrived late I had to sign in at the office and was taken to my new classroom by the head of the first year, Mrs Jacobson. All the other girls were already labelling their work books and studying the timetable. Mrs Jacobson asked me why I was late and I muttered something about the alarm not going off. She gave me a look, as if deciding to herself that I was going to be one to keep an eye on.

  Head down, I shuffled up the aisle and took the first available seat next to a girl called Karen Collins. She had incredibly long blonde hair, blue eyes and perfect peaches and cream skin. She also had a flair for fashion, and even though the school had a strict uniform policy, I noticed over the coming weeks that she always managed to wear something that was just a little bit different. She looked stylish and well-groomed whereas I was plain and scruffy.

  I was surprised when Karen latched on to me because she was the archetypal popular girl, whereas I had no other friends. The thing that drew us together was a shared sense of humour and a love of mucking around, making each other laugh. We really clicked and for a few short hours during the school day, she would make it easier for me to put my problems on the back burner. But there was a sticking point. Every day after school, she would ask me to come out later. There was nothing I wanted more, just to be free and have fun like any other teenager, but I knew Dad wouldn’t let me. Karen lived near me, and as we walked home together, picking up Kat from her after-school club, she’d keep trying to persuade me to come out. I didn’t know how to explain about Dad and his strange ways, his violence and all the other more worrying things that were happening to me, so I’d have to make up excuses

  ‘I just don’t feel like it,’ I said, struggling to think of a more plausible excuse.

  I could see that she was puzzled by my refusal, especially as we had been having a laugh only minutes before. Sometimes, even though I told her not to, she’d come and knock for me. Dad would jump up to peek through the curtains and say ‘It’s that prat Karen. Tell her to fuck off.’

  The friendship wasn’t just about laughing and joking, though. As I grew to trust her, I told Karen a few things about my home life, such as the fact that I had to get Kat ready for school in the mornings, which was why I was always late. Karen was sympathetic. She had witnessed the trouble I got into when I arrived at school every morning and tried to find an excuse for my perpetual lateness.

  ‘Why don’t you just tell them you have to drop your little sister off first?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t want to get Mum in trouble with the school,’ I said, meaning I didn’t want to get myself into trouble with Dad for telling the truth.

  Dad began insisting I stay off school more and more. I would have to walk Kat to school and then turn around and go back home again with a heavy heart. Sometimes he would send me out for sweets and we’d watch a programme he had taped, but more often than not he said he was tired and wanted us to go upstairs and watch the telly on the portable in his bedroom. I came to dread hearing him say, ‘Let’s go upstairs.’

  ‘I really should be at school, Dad,’ I told him one day. ‘Mrs Jacobson has been asking me if there’s anything wrong at home.’

  ‘What the fuck you been telling her, you stupid bitch?’ he snarled, throwing a spoon so hard at the wall above my head that it left a dent in the wallpaper.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said trying to calm the situation. ‘I just said I haven’t been feeling well, that’s all.’

  ‘Nosey fucking cunt,’ he said, grinding out his cigarette in the remains of his fried egg sandwich.

  When Mum came in at lunchtime, she didn’t bat an eye at finding Dad in bed and me under the covers with him. It was a relief to see her because I knew that after she’d had a cup of tea she would get undressed and get into bed with him for a ‘nap’. Then I would be free to go. I didn’t have to collect Kat from school until 3.30pm, so I had a couple of hours to kill. Usually I’d put the television on to mask the noise Mum and Dad were making upstairs, but there were never any good programmes at that time of day so there was nothing to distract me from thinking about all the things that were wrong in my life.

  I hated the things Dad did to me. I felt utterly powerless. The only person who could have helped me was Mum, but she didn’t seem to mind the way Dad treated me. Sometimes when he made a crude comment about my developing body, I would glance over at her as if to ask if she felt his behaviour was appropriate, but all she would do is make light of it by laughing, or saying ‘Oh my gawd! Who’s gonna look at you?’ Most of the time she looked away, unable to meet my tearful eyes, and busied herself with lighting a cigarette or fiddling with her false teeth. I began to feel real resentment towards her for not rescuing me, which only added to the chasm that already existed where the mother/daughter bond should have been. At those moments, I felt unbearably lonely.

  I wondered what Mum would say if I told her what Dad was doing to me as we watched television together, while she was downstairs watching the same programme in another room? She would have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to realise something wasn’t right. The urge grew in me to mention it and get it out in the open.

  One afternoon when I heard her getting out of bed and shuffling past the front room door on her way down to the kitchen, I stood up to follow her. I didn’t know what I would say, but I knew I had to say something.

  As I walked into the kitchen she said, ‘You’d better go and get Kat. Time’s getting on.’

  ‘Mum,’ I said, feeling tears welling up. ‘Dad does things…’

  ‘What?’ she snapped, her whole body stiffening.
Her voice was low and threatening. ‘What you on about?’

  I could tell she knew what I was going to say but her voice, body language, and the angry expression on her face were all flashing a red warning not to proceed.

  I carried on with sobs punctuating every word. ‘He…does…it…upstairs…It’s not…my…fault.’

  She was quick to interrupt me, thrusting her face angrily into mine. ‘Now don’t you fucking start with all that bollocks.’

  ‘All what bollocks?’ Dad suddenly appeared behind me, a towel wrapped around his waist. ‘What’s going on here?’

  ‘Nothing’s going on,’ said Mum, pouring boiling water into a couple of chipped mugs before spooning in heaps of sugar. ‘She just wants all the fucking attention as per usual.’

  ‘I’ll give her attention,’ said Dad, staring at me steadily. ‘I’ll have to smack her cute little arse in a minute.’

  I stood rooted to the spot while I judged whether it was safe enough to leave the room. I kept my head down and stared at Dad’s bare feet on the lino in front of me–feet on which I knew every corn and callous. After letting out a loud fart he turned and padded through to sit at the dining-room table.

  ‘Oh, you dirty beast!’ Mum called after him in mock revulsion, then she turned to me. ‘Are you going to get your sister now or are you going to leave her standing in the playground on her own? Useless lump.’

  After that brief conversation, she became even more cold and distant towards me. Everything I did seemed to irritate her and I had no idea why. I was only twelve and I just yearned for her to protect me, as I sensed other mothers did for their daughters. But she didn’t love me the way they did. She didn’t even like me.

  A few days after our conversation, I was sitting on the floor in the front room, my geography exercise book spread out before me. I was trying to colour a picture of a volcano but Kat kept picking up my felt tips and scribbling on the side of my book. ‘Kat, no!’ I said again and again. ‘Mum, please tell her.’

  Mum sat in her chair saying nothing, just squinting at me through the haze of blue cigarette smoke that hung around her head. Then suddenly, from being so still and quiet, she seemed to explode. She rushed over to me, picked up my schoolbook and ripped it into pieces. She didn’t say anything other than a jumbled mass of ‘Fucking shit, fucking fed up, fucking little fucker,’ all rolled into one sentence.

  Her face red with rage, she turned on me, still swearing continuously. She pulled me up by the hair and dragged me out of the room then shoved me out of the door before slamming it behind me with a loud crash.

  I sat on the landing in total shock, my hair tangled, my T-shirt ripped and my body trembling. Mum had never hit me like that before. I replayed the events of the last few minutes and struggled to make sense of what I had done to anger her so much. What was it all about? Instinctively I knew that ever since that day in the kitchen when I’d tried to tell her about Dad, she had been like a simmering pot. Now she had reached boiling point, and I was terrified about what she would tell Dad and what he might do to me when he got home.

  I spent the rest of the day hiding under the bed in my room. When I heard Dad arrive I was shaking with fear. It didn’t take long for me to hear raised voices but this time the main voice was Mum’s, screeching and shouting in a way I had never heard before.

  ‘Bastard!’ she shouted.

  I strained to hear but it was difficult from my position under the bed when they were two floors down in the kitchen. I didn’t dare creep to the top of the stairs. I wasn’t sure I really wanted to know what the row was about anyway. All I knew was that Mum seemed to hate me. She saw me as the enemy and I had no idea why.

  I heard the door slam again and rushed to look out of the window. It was Dad, striding down the road. I jumped as the door opened behind me but it was only Kat. She looked frightened, with a dirty, tear-stained face and I felt really sorry for her. She was only four and Mum losing her temper like that must have been terrifying for her. I opened my arms and she ran into them and we cried together.

  When Dad came back later that evening he was carrying two bottles of brandy, which was usually a sign of trouble to come. He walked into the kitchen and slammed them down onto the work top.

  I slipped out of the room and ran upstairs, where I sat biting my nails down to the quick, dreading the moment I would hear his call–but it never came. The next morning I heard him snoring in the front room. He had obviously been too drunk to go to work and Mum had left him to sleep it off. I didn’t bother making any breakfast that day; I just rushed to get Kat dressed and out the door before he woke up and tried to stop me.

  That afternoon, I was sitting in my classical studies class and Mrs Jones was telling us about Icarus and his waxen wings. Normally I loved to listen to old myths and fables but this day I found it hard to concentrate. I stared at the clock and willed it to stop. Every passing moment brought me closer to home time and Dad. I wanted the class to go on forever.

  Suddenly the classroom door opened and our head of year, Mrs Jacobson, appeared. I watched her eyes scan the room briefly before settling on me. She whispered to Mrs Jones, who asked me to gather my things. My heart gave a frightened leap as I wondered what was happening.

  Mrs Jacobson led me down to her office on the ground floor. ‘Your mother’s come to collect you, dear,’ she said. When she ushered me into her office, Mum was sitting on a chair in front of the desk. She had a plastic carrier bag clutched to her lap, and I could make out the blue cotton of my nightdress through the thin white plastic.

  I listened as Mum explained that there had been a family emergency. ‘I don’t want to go into details,’ she said, ‘but Lisa won’t be in for a few days.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve been meaning to contact you about her attendance,’ said Mrs Jacobson, ‘but under the circumstances, it can wait.’

  ‘She’s always been sickly, that’s all,’ said Mum, the irritation clear in her voice.

  ‘Of course,’ said Mrs Jacobson, looking me up and down with her sharp beady eyes. ‘But in future we will need a note.’

  ‘Well, I can’t sit here all day,’ said Mum, standing up abruptly. ‘We’ve got to go. Come on, Lisa.’

  My mind raced as I wondered what could possibly have happened. Had Dad gone away somewhere? My heart lifted at the possibility that he might have left us. But then if that was the case, where was she taking me with my nightdress in a plastic bag?

  When we got outside, I kept asking what was happening, but she didn’t say anything until we reached the bus stop. ‘It’s him, ain’t it? He’s finally gone mad,’ she said sharply.

  She seemed so angry that I wondered if they had had a row about me. I tried hard not to cry as I knew it was one of the main things that made her cross with me.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

  ‘You’re going to stay with Diane for a few days.’

  ‘Who?’ I asked in shock. I couldn’t believe I had just heard her say my oldest sister’s name out loud.

  ‘Diane.’ She pulled a crumpled piece of paper out of her coat pocket. ‘She’s living up Hackney way.’

  I couldn’t stop the tears then. I hadn’t seen Diane in four years, since I was eight, but it felt like an eternity to me. I was overwhelmed by feelings, crying and smiling all at the same time, but gradually a terrible cold fear descended on me. If Mum knew for sure about Dad abusing me and that’s what their big row was about, then she would surely tell Diane. And Diane would tell Cheryl and Davie, and Nanny and Jenny. The thought of everybody looking at me as if I were dirty made it hard to breathe. I was frightened.

  ‘Can you stop that wailing?’ asked Mum. ‘You’re showing me right up. What you got to cry about anyway?’

  When our bus came along, she pinched off the lit end of her cigarette and put it in the pocket of her brown sheepskin coat for later.

  We sat in silence for a while then Mum said, ‘It’s your fault, just like it was Cheryl’s.’

  At f
irst I didn’t understand what she was talking about.

  ‘He’s a man, for fuck’s sake. What do you think’s gonna happen if it’s put on a plate for him?’

  I felt as if she had just slapped me hard across the face. What was she saying? That I wanted Dad to do those vile things to me? I flushed bright red, and was glad we were both staring ahead out of the front window.

  ‘Mum,’ I sobbed, ‘You don’t understand. He hits me if I don’t do as he says. It’s not my fault.’

  ‘Well it ain’t fucking mine.’

  We didn’t talk after that. I pressed my forehead against the window, closed my eyes and wished I’d never been born. How could she blame me? What could I possibly have done differently?

  After we got off the bus at the other end, we walked along a busy main road. Mum looked at the piece of paper to check the address and we stopped outside a dilapidated house set back from the road behind a dense, overgrown garden. Lots of the windows were smashed, and black bin liners used as curtains fluttered in the breeze.

  ‘This can’t be it,’ said Mum. ‘What the fuck’s she doing living here?’

  She pushed open the rusty front gate and we picked our way up the front path, careful to avoid the broken glass and empty lager cans. We had to climb some steps to get to the front door, which had FUCK OFF scrawled on the front in black felt tip. Mum hesitated but before she could knock at the door, it opened to reveal a youth in his early twenties. He had curly ginger hair, spots around his protruding jaw, and bad teeth.

  ‘Is Diane in?’

  ‘Diane be here soon,’ he said nodding. He had a strange manner about him and when he led us through to the front room, Mum whispered to me that he must be ‘a bit simple’.

  The room had an old brown sofa and a gas fire in the corner. I recognised a couple of Diane’s ornately beaded handbags hanging on the wall as decoration. A friend at her first job had brought them back from a trip to India. I remembered holding them when I was a little girl.

  Mum asked the boy, who had introduced himself as Ewan, if she could use the toilet. He pointed to an open doorway, which led to the back of the house. It was then I noticed the word BOG scrawled at the top of the doorway in the same handwriting as the FUCK OFF on the front door. Mum noticed too, and her mouth fell open for a moment.